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Ooops, I feel the need to clarify part of my comment where I feel may deliver the wrong message.
I had said:
"The SEO community has discussed at length disqualifiers search engines might use to devalue a link such as the text "Sponsored" or "Links" among others and with the search engines having come this far it's highly unlikely that your site is penalized for these pages. '
What I meant to imply was the unlikeliness of a website being penalized by almost universally common pages such as "Privacy Policy", "Copyright", etc. -
NOT by links with text such as "Sponsored links" or a "links page" - which is obviously a different ball game that will penalize a page/website in the eyes of a search engine.
Apologies on this one - I should have been more clear in my original comment and not assumed people would make that inference from the previous paragraph.
I think SEO's would be wise to take caution before they go slicing and dicing their websites link structure with no follow tags.
What I don't really understand about the rush to use no follow is this: If you accept this idea you are basically assuming that the search engines haven't identified and already devalued Privacy Policy, Copyright, etc. in their calculations, in my opinion the idea that search engines haven't long since identified this very basic pattern in websites is silly.
The SEO community has discussed at length disqualifies search engines might use to devalue a link such as the text "Sponsored" or "Links" among others and with the search engines having come this far it's highly unlikely that your site is penalized for these pages.
I think that argument could also be expanded to "add to cart" and other e-commerce pages as well. These are legacy 1.0 designs implemented into practically every website today. The SEO community has always been overly paranoid, but I think in this instance it's a true stretch.
Speaking of paranoia, try this on...
If you use a "no follow" in your links. What are you REALLY telling the search engines? "Here is a link, but I don't really trust the content." If you don't trust the content, then why link to it anyway?
Let's expand that idea... "Here is a link, but it's an internal link to another part of my website, which I don't trust enough for you to follow" Hmmm.... Do you see where I'm going with this? "Here is my content, I've deemed it worthy to host on my website, but don't look at it!"
Can anyone say Suspicious? This to me seems like SEO bait to me.
I would be interested to if websites that heavily use this nofollow to slice their websites up are flagged as over optimized/spammy down the road.
Story: Why Spam Google Groups?
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Story: You'd Be Wise To "No Follow" This Dubious SEO Advice