Optimizing Free Sites

[Halfdeck]

Nofollow is not going to help in a place where it's use is not intended.

Major, I agree with your attitude. SEO is not needed if you're happy with your Google rankings. If you're not happy with your rankings, on the other hand, getting inbounds and creating good content is just the tip of the iceberg.

The "nofollow" tag was originally designed to eliminate ranking comment spam. Why would a good algo read a "nofollow" in a zone that was not designed to allow comments?

I don't have time for an elaborate reply Major, but here's the short of it:

REL=nofollow has evolved since inception.

Technically, rel=nofollow is a granular META ROBOTS NOFOLLOW, which prevents all links on a page from passing link value. From Google's POV, rel=nofollow is not limited to blog comment spam, though it was introduced to combat it.

Google recommends nofollowing uneditorial links, paid links, advertisement banners, affiliate links, etc. (I don't have the time right now to dig up where Google recommends this).

Google also recommends using nofollow to get more pages indexed by controlling the flow of PageRank.