Posts: 10,815
Name: Steven Bradley
Location: Boulder, Colorado
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If you're asking the question to decide how and when to link out don't overthink it. Link out when the page on the other side of the link will be useful to your audience. Personally I don't add nofollow, because if I think the page is valuable I'm happy to pass on whatever seo value that link has to the page. I only add nofollow if I'm linking to something I don't think good, but want to point to as an example. It's also on comment links on my blog by default.
As far as what search engines (mainly Google) say about nofollow…
Every page has a certain value and it passes some of that value on to the pages it links to. When you link to a page on another site you don't lose anything, but you have less value to pass though other links which might be to other pages of your site.
A few years ago when you added nofollow no link value was passed and would be saved for other links on your page. Google changed that and now that link value is passed on, but never reaches the other page. In other words for the page doing the link there really isn't any difference whether or not you add nofollow as far as what value is passed from page to page.
As far as things like linking to related content or using certain anchor text it probably helps the page being linked to more than the page linking out, but the page linking out might get some small benefit. Google has said they like pages that link out to pages on other sites. How much of a benefit it has they won't say.
Another thing to keep in mind is how the person receiving the link responds. If you link to my site and include nofollow on the link, I'm not likely to link back to you. If you don't include the nofollow, I'm much more likely to keep your site in mind when I want to link to a resource.
Again though don't overthink this. If you think another page will be valuable for your audience, link to it and don't bother with the nofollow.
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