When is it best to use the No Follow Tag and what is the code (and placement) for this? ~ Thanks!

http://google.com/search?q=meta+tag+robots+no+follow

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

There is no such thing as a no follow tag, but you probably mean the rel attribute, which can contain "nofollow". Nofollow works like this:

<a href="external-site.com/untrusted.html" rel="nofollow">External Site</a>

All that does is ask search engines not to count the link when it calculates links to do its rankings.

There is no such thing as a no follow TAG - there IS an ATTRIBUTE that goes on a <a> tag.

<a href="blahhh....." rel="nofollow">link</a>

If you don't want the SE spiders to follow that link, then you use the nofollow attribute.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

Wayfarer, you and I posted at the same time !

do I win something for posting first?

lol.. well.. I could drop something off in a few weeks when I come thru your town on my way to Greenville

My girlfriend says she wants some shoes. Size 6.

Heels or flats ?

she says boots please. with heels on them.

Thanks for replies, but I guess I'm still wondering why should I use it at all?... What are the consequences of using it or not?

You really don't need to use it at all, but some ideas about why you might:

The original idea behind nofollow was to fight spam comments on blogs. Since Google won't follow a link with rel="nofollow" that link won't pass PageRank and theoretically would turn off spammers who were commenting solely for the link. The theory didn't work since there are other reasons for spam comments, though.

Most blog software still adds the rel="nofollow" and the idea is basically to say you don't vouch for the site on the other side of the link. If you consider a link as a vote for another web page then adding rel="nofollow" is saying you're linking to the page, but aren't voting for it as a quality page. Maybe you're writing something about a web page you think is doing something wrong. You want real people to be able to find the page, but you don't want to give them a voting link to help with their search ranking.

Nofollow has evolved beyond the "I don't trust this web page" thing. There's a debate in the SEO community about PR sculpting. The idea is that each page on your site only has so much PR to pass to other pages and it might be best to control how your PageRank flows. For example you might link to a privacy policy on every page of your site, but it's not something you care whether or not it ranks. So you might nofollow all links to the privacy policy page with the idea that the other pages you're linking to on those same pages get a little extra PR than they were getting when your privacy policy page was also getting PR. Ultimately you're sacrificing some pages on your site in order to help more important pages of your site.

There's a lot of debate about the usefulness of PR sculpting. Some say it's very important and others say it's mostly worthless. Odds are the truth lies somewhere in between. I wouldn't recommend jumping into sculpting your site though without a lot more understanding of the ideas behind it. You could end up doing more harm than good.

A search for PR sculpting should bring up a lot of results.

More than likely you won't need to worry about using rel="nofollow" except in the case where you want to link to a page or site and you don't want the link being seen as a recommendation for that site where search engines are concerned.