[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

You are laboring under a widespread but nonetheless false understanding of how a page passes PageRank. A link pointing to another page is a "vote" for the destination page and may add PageRank to that destination page. The originating page loses nothing.

The equation for this is:

PR passed = .85 * {PR of originating page} / {total # outgoing links on the originating page, incl. internal navigation links}

Note that using nofollow still counts as an outgoing link in this equation.

No matter how hard you try to keep your PR up, it doesn't work any more for already quite some time as it had before, because as far as I know, Google has not renewed their rights on a relative patent held by somebody else.

Also, the "ranking" (i.e. at which position your pages show in searches) is undergoing a lot of changes lately, all of which are favouring real information and penalizing "page rank thiefs".

Under these aspects, follow or nofollow have not a lot of meaning towards ranking, at most it does mean now the real thing: follow or leave that link