Are there internal links that should be set to nofollow? The question is not entirely unjustified and there were also times when this question could be answered with yes and SEOs diligently tested in which case it is more favorable to set an internal link to nofollow. Today, the prevailing opinion is rather "no", even for sites like the Imprint.
Where did the idea of setting internal links to Nofollow come from?
A few years ago, the situation with follow and nofollow links was as follows: the link juice used to be distributed to the follow links that were present on a page. Nofollow links, on the other hand, received nothing. Webmaster used this fact to better distribute the linkjuice, which is called Pagerank Sculpting designated. Pages like ImprintDisclaimers were set to Nofollow, because they should not appear high up in the search. The power should be given to the important traffic-generating pages. But also links that were twice on the page, such as menu items that were present several times, e.g. once in the main navigation or once in the footer, were also partially provided with Nofollow by some.
Clever SEOs tried out various scenarios and came to the realization that it can actually make a big difference whether a particular link is given a follow or nofollow.
However, Google made a decisive change here some time ago. The linkjuice is distributed equally to all links. This means that if there are 5 links on a page, one of which is nofollow, each follow link receives 1/5 of the link juice. When the Pagerank Sculpting was still possible, in this case 1/4 juice each went to the follow links, i.e. a good bit more. That's the theory and that's why we experimented with Follow/Nofollow for internal links.
A survey by "Search Engine Roundtable" confirmed that even when there was no Pagerank Sculpting gave more, 50% of SEOs used Nofollow internally.
Do not set internal links to Nofollow
The opinion of most SEOs at the moment is that it makes no sense to Nofollow internal links, according to the tool provider Sistrix in an article on the subject of Nofollow.
And Matt Cuttsthe former head of the Google Web Spam Team, has already commented on this in a video. It could even be disadvantageous, because the links would fall out of the link graph and it would go Pagerank lost. It makes more sense to focus on providing new content than to waste time on linkjuice distribution on the site.
In cases where certain pages appear too high up in the search results and displace other important ones, it is better to use the noindex Day together with follow.
In the above video Matt Cutts with : "I would not use "nofollow", since I believethat it has more disadvantages than advantages." I hope he knows it too, instead of just believing it, as in his usual vague formulation.