[addamroy]

Just to clarify, you guys are all wrong about the pagerank thing.

If you understood what pagerank actually 'is', you'd have a better understanding of how to properly use nofollow.

Page rank is by definition, simply put, a calculation of the likelihood that a person entering the internet randomly clicking on links will land on any particular site.

The higher the chances of a person entering the internet randomly clicking links will land on your site, the higher your page rank. Go read up on it, go to wikipedia first, if you're unsure of my validity.

Think about it like this, facebook.

The chances of a person entering the internet randomly clicking links landing on facebook is extremly high if not almost guaranteed, which is why facebook has a pagerank of 9 or 10. Same with wikipedia, amazon, ebay, twitter, etc.

A link from pages with high page rank on these sites increases your pagerank because, again simply put, the chances of a person landing on the page your link is on is pretty high, thus making the chances of a user landing on your site higher, thus increasing your page rank.

This is why blasting out hundreds or thousands of those crap forum profile links does not mean you'll necessarily get ANY page rank, because chances are slim to none a person entering the internet randomly clicking links will ever land on your forum profile, therefore passing virtually ZERO pagerank.

So, understanding what pagerank IS... you will not LOSE pagerank by placing external links on your site (this does not decrease the chances of a person landing on your site), however you will PASS pagerank via the links on your site.

Pagerank is distributed EVENLY throughout all DOFOLLOW links on a page, once again simply put, all nofollow does is disallow the passage of pagerank to that site. NOFOLLOW tags eliminate that link from Google's 'graph of the web' thus eliminating it from their calculations when determining the 'chances a user entering the internet randomly clicking on links' will land on your site.

If you put nofollow tags on all the external RBS links, the only upside for YOU is you're distributing a little more pagerank throughout your own site from the page the link is on.

In my opinion, depending on how many external links you have in the first place, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.