braap - 4:17 pm on Mar 29, 2007 (gmt 0)

I have noticed a competitor's site placing no-follow on internal links to pages that are not on topic/theme, i.e. privacy policy, contact, user agreement, etc...

I assume they are doing this to preserve or funnel PR to their most important on-topic pages.

I have noticed the site has gradually been losing positions in SERPS over the past several months. No, they are not being out SEOD, if that is a word, by their competitors. I also realize that we can't hold and analyze this in a vacuum, so there is no need to speculate about other factors that could cause of a drop in rankings.

I would like to know others thoughts on whether or not placing no-follow on internal links could hurt a site in the eyes of Google.

For example, could placing no-follow on internal links hurt a site's trust rank, thus possibly hurting their rankings?

Also, if you don’t feel that it would hurt a site, would placing no-follow on internal links serve much of a purpose at all?