What type of links should be followed and nofollowed internally?

[SEODinosaur]

We have submitted our sitemap.xml to search engines so now that they have that should we use a nofollow attribute on the sitemap.html? Do we even need a sitemap.html?

For other links on the site such as:

Contact us

About Us

Locations

and other phrases that we are not trying to rank for should we set these to nofollow?

[AlanMosley]

You should not use no-follow in internal links at all. you would simply be robbing yourself of link juice.

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

The only time you should use a no-follow is when you are linking to a external site that has a bad reputation, such as a porn site or spam site, that you do not want to be associated with.

[THB]

"The only time you should use a no-follow is when you are linking to a external site that has a bad reputation, suchas a porn site or spam site, that you do not want to be associated with."

In which case, you shouldn't be linking to those sites anyway.

the 'nofollow' attribute was created many years ago to be used within comment systems, and not within a website link structure.

In my opinion, I fail to see any time in which you feel you should be adding nofollow to any external link.  If you are linking to an external site, it should ONLY be to a site that is relevant to your site and of a reputable nature.  Adding nofollow to that seems redundant.

If you add nofollow to all your outgoing links, I could only imagine that Googlebot starts thinking, "why are these guys adding all these links to sites they don't trust?"

[Cornel_Ilea]

Hi Donnie,

One of the occasions when you should use nofollow is paid links.

If you are offering sponsored links to you partners, Google demands that you nofollow those links.

Cornel

[AlanMosley]

If you are writing an article on spam or malware, you may want to link to such a site, but not be associated with it.

[AlanMosley]

Good point

[DesignBigger]

Not necessarily. Yes, you shouldn't automatically nofollow every external link; however, nofollowed external links versus followed external links have to be treated differently.

Especially in cases of online journalism and blogging, it's not unheard of to link to a site that might be unsavory. Using a nofollow in that case (where otherwise, external links are usually followed) would clue crawlers in that "this site might be bad, don't ding us for it".

If 95% of your external links are spam/porn, and you nofollow one of those links, then, yes, you should expect to get smacked down. But, when you have a slightly shady in-context link that's nofollowed, and plenty of other good links that are followed, it's not going to be an issue.