The nofollow was like telling search engines, “don’t follow this link
and give my PageRank to that page.”
However, many SEO practitioners abused this until Google came up
with an update in 2009 on PageRank evaporation.
In a nutshell, PageRank hoarding just didn’t work like
it used to. Multiple theories and best practices have
sprung out of this, such as:Don’t have too many outbound links: In theory, the whole
reasoning of PageRank leaking still holds up to today.
However, every once in a while, you may find sites with
tons of outbound links, and yet the page still ranks high.
Thus the rule here is just doing what seems to make
sense.Don’t always nofollow all outbound links: Adding a
rel=nofollow attribute to links on the <a> tag tells search
engines to not credit that link for ranking purposes.
It makes sense to always add the nofollow to avoid
PageRank leaking to other sites. However, overdoing or
over-optimizing it just doesn’t appear natural, and the
intent appears to really be hoarding PageRank.WHY LINKS ARE IMPORTANT FOR SEO