Question re nofollow

[googlealchemist]

What you guys have posted here about nofollow wasting link juice into the ether vs blocking it from leaving/keeping it on my site, was very enlightening.

So now it seems if im going to be linking out to authority sites to tie in entities, provide beneficial reference links to readers, etc it makes sense to leave them as dofollow. Since im not 'keeping the juice' on my site by setting it to nofollow like i assumed before...it seems kinda silly to be linking out to a source i dont trust which is why i would be setting the nofollow tag anyways aside from being link juice greedy.

And I no longer bother trying to 'sculpt' things by nofollowing privacy pages etc either.

That said, i noticed there are various internal links here on the forum that are set to nofollow such as the dates to the posts and the edit/reply links, and the specific internal post link. so i wanted to see if im missing something in my understanding of this?

 

[Ryuzaki]

The reason for the forum nofollows is they all lead right back to the page googlebot is already looking at. They’re there specifically for humans to link to specific posts. Not only does Google not need that, they can sort it out in other ways and it would be wasteful to have them reloading pages, both for them and BuSo. Also, they probably already know not to crawl a link that leads to the same page it’s already on anyways. The edit/reply links don’t do anything for them and probably don’t even show for them, but it’s still more efficient for the forum for all the dummies that create accounts to crawl and scrape the forum.