NoFollow on Outbound Links to Authority Sites?

[consultant1027]

I did a bunch of reading on nofollow. I still cannot find a definitive answer on whether or not to include nofollow on outbound links to authoritative sites? Matt Cutts is wishy washy on the subject, at least considering authoritative sites.

My initial feeling is that you SHOULD use nofollow. Why dilute the link juice being passed to your internal pages by passing link juice to sites like Wikipedia or Apple Computer? Especially considering Google follows the links anyway, they just do pass link juice or show the page linked to in the index. But that is not an issue with an authoritative site/page as it is already in the index and linked to without nofollow on thousands of sites?

Yet, it is generally accepted that outbound links to authoritative sites related to the keyword focus of your web page, is a positive factory in Google's algorithm. So IN GENERAL, does SEO's feel it is better to use nofollow to preserve link juice for internal pages, or does nofollow negate the positive rank effect for linking to related authoritative sites?

[markowe]

In my opinion all this is waaaay overthinking things. If your page's ranking so delicately depends on the minutest precious drops of link-juice that you are afraid to spill a single bit then something is wrong. There are just way more important factors involved in SEO.

I DO include outgoing links as an SEO tactic, honestly I never bothered with whether they were df or nf, I think they are df by default in WP. Does any of it make a difference? Well, as a TINY part of my overall largely successful SEO strategy, yes. On its own, don't know, CAN'T know, so don't care

[StoneWilson]

If you permit people quote your website's contents, you can't control whether their websites are df or nf, so don't worry about this.