It doesn't mean that at all. In fact, it suggests the opposite. If you have ten links, each link gets 1/10th the PR assigned. "Dropping" the nofollowed one means you lose the 1/10th.
You have a good point and it could also be a reason why results aren’t significant. However, how can the pagerank be lost when nofollowed links do not count as a vote, they are not used for page rank, and they are not crawled? This would mean the nofollowed link stops being a link from Google's POV. They are removed from the link graph and instead of ten links there would be only nine links left on the page.
When you nofollow one of the ten links and the total doesn’t get divided by nine instead of ten, that would mean PageRank sculpting would not be possible. Matt says this about sculpting.
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“More like people can use it for internal links if they're power-user-y enough to want to sculpt PageRank flow within their site at the link level”.
If PageRank sculpting is possible then there would be no PR lost through nofollowed links. Matt also said - it’s very much a second order effect on rankings so I do not think it’s worth it for many websites.
You have a good point and it could also be a reason why results aren’t significant. However, how can the pagerank be lost when nofollowed links do not count as a vote, they are not used for page rank, and they are not crawled?
_Crawling_ of links doesn't assign PR. _Seeing_ the href is what get something PR. This is easy to demonstrate since if you remove a 301 from a page you can see its pagerank display. Also, Google will show URL-only listings for URLs it "sees" but can't get to. Once it can get to those pages they display pagerank.
Basically it comes down to what comes first the chicken or the egg. Do they count all the hrefs in the world first, then discard the nofollow ones from the link graph or do they discard nofollow links before they count all the hrefs. By saying "dropped" that implies they are first counted, though it isn't totally clear. If they were never counted, instead of "dropped" I would think the phrase used would be "nofollow links are ignored" or "never counted".
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Originally Posted by PokerproEU
When you nofollow one of the ten links and the total doesn’t get divided by nine instead of ten, that would mean PageRank sculpting would not be possible. Matt says this about sculpting. If PageRank sculpting is possible then there would be no PR lost through nofollowed links. Matt also said - it’s very much a second order effect on rankings so I do not think it’s worth it for many websites.
Unfortunately it does. Normally what Matt doesn't say is more important than what he does. You can sculpt your pagerank by not sending it to a contact page. That is, if you don't want a page to rank, you can make it not rank. It's true that the logical way to parse his sentence is that nofollowing one link makes the rest of the links on a page send more PR, but he and others at Google have not said that one simple, straightforward statement, so that likely (but not for sure) means the straightforward reading of the sentence is probably not accurate.
Back to the original point, the way Google looks at nofollow has changed and may change in the future. There is nothing "safe" about using it, for the longterm. The best plan is to build websites without useless pages, or at least minimize such links. For example, for almost anybody there is no need for both a contact page and a privacy page. Put them both on the same URL and link to that URL once on the footer of a page with text like "Contact Us - Privacy Policy".
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