So what does the famous google figure (Matt Cutts) have to say about internal Nofollow, links per page, and directories?

These are some key points that SEO practitioners want to know. Take internal Nofollow for example. It is possible for a website owner manipulate the Flow of link juice on its website by implementing nofollow on internal links. Will it be categorized as one of the no-no's of SEO? For me, I personally have some sites that implement using no-follows to internal links to manipulate the flow of PR.

Taken from SEOmoz

(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.)

How about the links per page. They say keep it under a hundred. What if the number of links are over 100? Will it have penalties? The usual idea why I and other SEOs keep it under a hundred is to strengthen the amount of PR juice going out to these links. Surely the link juice of a link from a page with only 10 links is greater than the link juice from a page with 100 links. That's pretty straight forward.

What does Matt have to say about this?

Matt's exact words - The "keep the number of links to under 100" is in the technical guideline section, not the quality guidelines section. That means we're not going to remove a page if you have 101 or 102 links on the page. Think of this more as a rule of thumb. Originally, Google only indexed the first 100 kilobytes or so of web documents, so keeping the number of links under 100 was a good way to ensure that all those links would be seen by Google. These days I believe we index deeper within documents, so that's less of an issue. But it is true that if users see 250 or 300 links on a page, that page is probably not as useful for them, so it's a good idea to break a large list of links down (e.g. by category, topic, alphabetically, or chronologically) into multiple pages so that your links don't overwhelm regular users.

How about directories? What does Matt have to say?

Matt's exact words - We tend to look more at the quality of a directory than whether it is SEO-related. Of course, plenty of directories that are targeted only for SEO don't add that much value in my experience. I talked about some of the factors that we use to assess the quality of a directory in an earlier post at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/
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"Q: Hey, as long as we're talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I'll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I'd ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn't speak well to the quality of
the directory.
- If there is a fee, what's the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
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Those are a few factors I'd consider. If you put on your user hat and ask "Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?" you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory."

[via seomoz]