What pages to nofollow?

[ClaytonKendall]

We are doing a homepage redesign on our site and as I was going through the code I noticed no links are nofollow links. We have pages such as policies, contact us, links, about us and FAQ that we are not really concerned if anyone visits or if they are indexed. Would it be smart to nofollow these links? Also what other types of links would you recommend we no follow? We would like to get as much link juice as possible to our top categories, but don't want necessary pages to get forgotten. Also, do links higher up on the page get more link juice than items on the bottom of the page? Any knowledge or suggestions on the topic is greatly appreciated!

[john4math]

Nofollowing links doesn't sculpt link juice, it burns it.  Doing this to internal links is bad, as you're wasting your own link juice!  If I don't want a page on my site on the SERPs, I'd much rather set a meta noindex, follow tag on the page I don't want indexed rather than nofollow links to it.

To explain burning vs. sculpting, here's an example.  Say page A has 6 votes of link juice to pass, and links to 3 other pages, B, C, and D.  If all the links are followed, it'll pass 2 votes to each page.  However, if you nofollow the link to page D, it won't give 3 votes to B and C, it'll give the same 2 votes to B and C, and the 2 votes that should have gone to page D go nowhere.  They're burned.

If instead you set a meta tag on page D to noindex, follow, the link juice will flow in and out of page D, so that would be much preferred.

[ClaytonKendall]

Very helpful, thanks John!