NoFollow could be looked at as, "I Dont Trust" - so why would you even have them on your site
Nathan Bradshaw: To reduce the passing of ourpage juice to external pages.
Tim Capper: Nathan Bradshaw but nofollow is I dont trust in a search engines eyes - so your reasoning is counter intuitive to how a search engine sees it.
If you firmly believe in "juice" then just dont have external links.
But thats bad for users right.
So which do you think Google would reward? - Bad UX or Juice
Jenni Brown: Nathan Bradshaw It gets divided between all links regardless of their rel= so only relevant if you have multiple sites and you`re linking between them
Michael Martinez: Nathan Bradshaw "To reduce the passing of ourpage juice to external pages."
It doesn`t work that way. Whether you use "nofollow" or not, every outbound link on the page deducts some PageRank-like value from the page`s outflow.
Jim Munro: Nathan Bradshaw Page Rank is like a currency that you can`t save. You can only spend it so there is no point attempting to manipulate it.
Ammon Johns: There are two possible reasons to mark the relationship of a link to "nofollow".
1. When the link can have been inserted without the author or editor of the site`s direct control or approval, such as links in user comments, or links that may be injected by an advertising block of code, and editing/approving all the links before publishing is not viable.
2. When making a negative citation reference for clarity that you want to make absolutely clear is not a positive reference or any kind of endorsement. For example, if you had an article talking about some WordPress plugin that had major security flaws and vulnerabilities, like it injected code and links, and because there are several similarly named plugins you want to directly link to the problem one, but not have Google think you are positively linking to and promoting malware.
In both of these cases, the use of NOFOLLOW is not to prevent the site getting `juice`, but to prevent YOUR site from being judged for linking to spam or malware, etc. For this reason, when the ability to tag nofollow first was introduced, it was jokingly referred to as a `link condom`. It stops the linking site from catching something if it happens to link to an infected (penalized) site.
If you were to mark all, or even a large proportion, of your outbound links as being untrustworthy and free of any editorial control, that would be a pretty clear signal to Google that your site was a low quality resource in terms of editorial control, opinion, or unique voice.
It announces the same sort of `unreliability` as a site that accepts any old link it is paid to, or allows any user to spam links into comment areas, even links that point to dangerous, spammy, or malicious content.
It says that on the grounds of EAT (Expertise, ity, and Trust) that you are categorically saying you apply NONE of those things to your links. That would be a major issue for SEO.
Christopher Fischbach: Ammon Johns I`d switch to UGC rather than nofollow for the comment section though. It`s there, why not use it. I think that would be helpful for Google to learn about comment spam easier maybe.
Other than that, an excellent comment, like always.
Ammon Johns: Christopher Fischbach yes, they expanded the list of common REL (relationship) tag attributes considerably, and there are now specific ones for user-generated content and for sponsored too.
Like you, I tend to think that the UGC rel is effectively treated the same as nofollow, just with a greater precision of data... But I am not as certain of it, and so on that small amount of doubt, for client stuff I tend to rely more on the tried and tested nofollow in the main.
However, if I had a client where UGC was a considerable part of the value, rather than mere commentary, such as a reviews site, or a forum/community site, I`d be far more likely to tag stuff there with the UGC rel.
Ammon Johns: David Morgan facebook doesn`t depend on Google traffic, and for several years entirely blocked Google via robots txt. Even today, Facebook go out of their way to *prevent* indexing by Google, which is one reason you have probably never, ever, seen a Facebook post show up in any search on Google - only profile pages.
David Morgan: This is true, but you can still glean from it.
Should we nofollow every outgoing link on our website? whether these are footer`s social media links or certificates or partnering website links? 
