No-follow tags on links in the footer...do it or don't do it?

[fergseo]

With some of the great reports SEOMoz has provided I've been able to start to take the correct steps towards fixing crawl issues, on-page issues, etc.

One of my websites allows a customer to drill down to their specific state and then their city to apply for an auto loan. The SEOMoz reports told me I had too many links on these pages specifically. One of my ways to remedy this would be to add "no-follow" tags on the links in the footer as well as the links to the cities.

Am I steering myself in the right/wrong direction? Should I be approaching this problem from a different perspective?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Getz.pro]

This is more a question than discussion.

If you no-follow on the footer, than that will be for the entire site (same footer on all pages, which means all footer links on all pages are no-follow), which is probably not desired. Can you code to not show the footer links, or reduced links on those pages?

Footer links should not be your site map on the bottom of each page, but rather, a list of key resource pages such as contact, company, high level product categories, FAQ, sign up for email, social networking links, etc.

If you want more details, please provide a link.

[SteveOllington]

It depends... are these links the only direct links to those particular pages? I mean, would you have to go an indirect route through the main menu or something (i.e. via a category)? If they're the only direct ones, keep them. You want the pages linked to from the homepage so they're as shallow as possible to get crawled.

Also, if they are not the only direct links, do the other ones have the appropriate anchor text?

It might be a good idea to keep them for the anchor text alone.

Are there any other links you could get rid of... how many links are there on this page?

[EGOL]

I would not place nofollow on the links for two reasons...... 1) pagerank that would have flowed into that link will evaporate with the nofollow (at least that is the latest word I've heard from google on this - although on this very issue they have had a tendency to change their mind without tellin').... 2) nofollow is often used for "we don't trust this".

How many links are you talking about... if just a few or a few dozen I would leave them as is.  If you have a ton of links down there then maybe a different link structure would be useful... might consider that for other reasons as well.  Not saying that what you have is bad.. just an opportunity to consider new things.