No-Follow Abuse! How is this OK?

95% of the links on this site are no follow

[sebastianpr123]

I am an SEO and i often check competitors websites for new updates.

A little back ground: a site recently updated their website both design and back end, new ajax functionality, etc...

A few days ago i noticed that 55 of their 88 internal links are now "nofollow"!?!?!?

What is this all about? I was always taught that this is nofollow abuse, over optimization! According to matt cutts its technically not:

[youtube.com...]

I know in the video matt cutts says you can use nofollow on your website as much as you want. I was hoping someone on this forum could guess what they are thinking. They have nofollowed almost all of their money pages!

I believe 1 of 3 things is going on:

1- Disgruntled former SEO has done this(Revenge)
2- Working out some functionality kinks(Maybe temporary)
3- SEO is smoking crack instead of cigars(Stupidity)

[edited by: agerhart at 6:36 am (utc) on June 25, 2009]
[edit reason] removed specifics per TOS [/edit]

[agerhart]

Doubt it is a disgruntled former employee although it is always a possibility.

My guess is that the person went a little too aggressive with their implementation of the nofollow tag.

I'm not opposed to using it in moderation and in the appropriate places. We've used it on a few sites and the tests we ran showed a positive improvement.

[canadafred]

I have always had the opinion that if you don't want the search engine to follow a link then the link shouldn't exist.

When PageRank had some significance, nofollow made some sense as a remedy for bleeding PR. As PR has deteriorated in useful functionality because of excessive abuse, the nofollow attribute is rediculously over-employed.

Essentially, this type of spider instruction is just another one of Google's obsolete dinosaurs that somehow continues to survive.

[londrum]

they're probably all just left over from the previous implementation.

i used to have a load of nofollows on my internal links as well, to try and concentrate the page rank on to my directory index pages. but as i understand it now, it has all changed and page rank no longer gets funnelled somewhere else if you nofollow a link. you just lose it.

maybe your competitors aren't aware that the rules have changed.
(i wouldn't like to be a customer of their SEO firm!)