Follow or no follow?

[HarrisonLighting]

Should I add NOFOLLOW to the links in the footer of my site like "about us", "Contact us" etc because they are in the footer they are on every page so would this harm SEO in any way?

[OptimizeSmart]

No need to add nofollow to the footer links. Keep it natural.

[HarrisonLighting]

Oh and one final thing, I have a menu system that uses ajax, Google reports too many links on the page because it has the main link eg ceiling-lighting.html but then you can choose things like colour so it would change it to ceiling-lighting.html?colour=brass+supplier=another etc is this damaging to the site?

[HarrisonLighting]

Thanks for the replies, I will leave them as they are, one other thing with regards to nofollow, does having more than one link to a page cause problems? for example on my product page the product title leads to the product so does clicking on the image and there is also a "more info" link that has the same url

[MikeQ-BACC]

Is page sculpting basicaly trying to manipulate crawlers into roaming your site more to specific pages to boost their rankings?

[deltasystems]

The only pages you should be using nofollow on would be any pages you don't want to be found in Google. PageRank sculpting is long dead (or so Google says) so you won't be able to horde your page strength.

Matt Cutts does use nofollow on his website, but only on his RSS feed. I go a step further and also nofollow any cart pages for ecommerce stores and any login/auth pages. Just anything that shouldn't be in search results.

I pretty much let PageRank flow freely throughout my site, and I’d recommend that you do the same. I don’t add nofollow on my category or my archive pages. The only place I deliberately add a nofollow is on the link to my feed, because it’s not super-helpful to have RSS/Atom feeds in web search results. Even that’s not strictly necessary, because Google and other search engines do a good job of distinguishing feeds from regular web pages.

--Matt Cutts

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

[Confetti_Wedding]

Pages such as the about us page can have real value to your readers so definitely leave these as followed links. Likewise, if your contact page has important information such as telephone numbers or physical address, you want these pages indexed.

Rand wrote a post on NoFollow sculpting which dates back to 2008 but is still pretty relevant.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

I don't see why you would want to do that; I would assume you would want the link juice on your site to spread freely through all the links so that each page is benefiting. If you nofollow the links then any links you follow will still be devalued by the nofollow links and the nofollow links themselves will not provide any juice to the rest of your site.

I would say that nofollowing your navigation links is therefore a bad idea

[SparkplugDigital]

I would leave these as normal links.

No-follow is designed for links that you don't want to pass value. This could include advertisements (Google wants paid advertisements to be no-follow) and comments on your blog.

There was a previous theory that no-following internal links would result in the other links on the page passing more value (page sculpting) but this was debunked by Google. An internal link with a no-follow would not pass link value and the link value would be lost (not funneled to the do-follow links).