Nofollow within your site, is it ever a good idea?

[PaddyDisplays]

I started a new job running  a companies E-commerce site.  I have been going thought the site, backlinks etc to see what the current status is.

I have noticed that they have "no followed some categorises on the (huge) mega  menu, but also they have no followed every product form categories.

Now personally I would have no follows on the login/register/checkout page, and maybe some external links, but my understanding  has always been  that by using no follow on internal links you just throwing away google juice.

I'm thinking was someone at some stage trying to do some misguided link sculpting with no follow, or I'm I missing something

Note:  the company does not have brands per say for the product pages and so are not landing pages (the categories are landing pages)

[PaddyDisplays]

"Nofollows cannot be used for link sculpting anymore, and just result in link juice evaporation."

This was what I thought too, just wanted to confirm, thanks

[TakeshiYoung]

It is never a good idea to nofollow links on your own site.

Nofollows cannot be used for link sculpting anymore, and just result in link juice evaporation.

If you don't want pages on your site indexed, you should add a noindex,follow meta tag to the header. This will keep the page from being indexed while preserving link juice.

Nofollow should only be used for links you don't trust or sites that you have commercial relationships with, which could be construed as link buying.

[PaddyDisplays]

"Do we believe today that nofollows really drain SEO equity from a website?"

I think so, but I don't think its 100% drop from a no follow (not that anyone said it was)

About a year or 2  ago (on a different site), they had a mega menu which had no-follow on less import categories (trying to link sculpt), This was changed so that they no followed links were just removed completely, and I believe this did have an effect on ranking on the pages that were not cut.

But I agree sometimes its necessary (easier?) to no-follow some links, and if its only a few there is very little damage, but I'm talking about every product page so collectively, possibl,y a lot of juice lost.  I can't think of a good reason to do that, unless it was a lazy way to eliminate dup content or the product pages competing with the category pages as landing pages.

[CarsProduction]

Do we believe today that nofollows really drain SEO equity from a website? Or was this something Matt Cutts started to discourage page rank scultping? I defer to greater minds on that. But if so it punishes good practices as well as bad, depending on the context.

We nofollow links not to page rank sculpt but, among other reasons, because we don't want spiders to take that particular route to whatever is behind that link. The nofollow pretends there isn't an href there. For example, our optimization/canonicalization on certain pages doesn't persist when certain links are followed -- so we nofollow those to prevent duplicate content.

Of course it's not always the most efficient way to manage crawling --but we don't worry about losing juice if we feel we need a nofollow.