No followed links, what happens to the PR?

[Bondara]

Hi,

I have read a few times, on here and other places that when a website applies a no follow tag to a link the PR is not retained but instead disappears (evaporates) thus neither website benefiting.

Is that true? If so what is the actual benefit of no following a link?

[Tompt]

You raise an excellent point, I had completely forgotten that. EGOL has the right of it, Matt Cutts said it evaporates and aside from that we don't really know. I've seen nothing since that gives us any more information and I think given how things have changed you'd have a lot of trouble running an experiment to find out.

I should have been more careful when I spoke

Nofollow is something I honestly don't worry about in my day to day linking practices, to me it's just a way of indicating that my linking is not a personal endorsement of the site I am linking to.

While my first and fourth paragraphs above may be null and void, the rest I believe remains true.

One thing I forgot to add above (my poor memory is a theme here) is that the site receiving the nofollowed link still gets the traffic from the link and maybe some lesser residual link benefits. There is a reason that nofollows still feature in the SEOmoz analytics.

[Bondara]

Thanks,

So your saying it is retained on the website?

Check it out, EGOL post para 3 - http://www.seomoz.org/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice

That's just one of the reasons why I started questioning it but I have seen it else where.

I suppose it's not really a question as I don't actually worry about it that much but I like to know so the question had to be asked.

Thanks for the reply.

[Tompt]

It doesn't evaporate, it just reduces the flow considerably from one site to another, allowing the linking site to retain some of it's "juice".

It's also a way to indicate a sponsored link, keeping your site in line with Google's spam guidelines.

Or you can use it to link to a site you want to talk about but don't want to be that associated with.

There are very good reasons to use nofollow, but  it's important to keep your linking natural, so don't take this information and decide to nofollow everything to preserve PR.

I would also encourage you to worry a lot less about Page Rank in general, but that's a battle for another time.

EDIT: read next reply and my follow up for revisions and my errors.