Should i nofollow my terms and conditions from a SEO perspective?

Question

i have build an e-commerce site, and I'm slowly looking into SEO. My question is simple, should i nofollow pages like "terms and conditions", "deliveryterms", "contact page". The reason I'm asking, is that my Terms and Conditions are ALOT alike the other sites out there, and i think it would be 80% duplicate content - furthermore these sites are not relevant (in my opinion) compared to my product pages.

On my site i also have some DIY-guides, which i won't nofollow, since it's original content and very relevant to my site. So I'm only talking about pages like the above mentioned.

Should i or should i not nofollow pages like this (only pages with very limited unique content)? What are the pros and cons of doing one or the other?

Answer 1

Matt Cutts (Search/Quality group in Google) does not recommend Page Rank Sculpting (includes use of no-follow) in general, but he does say

There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

Answer 2

No. Nofollow is to block spam and abuse. If you block pages that you know aren't spam, like you own internal pages, you are abusing nofollow and breaking the Internet. Or, more importantly to you, you are harming your own SEO efforts. By using nofollow to your own pages you are sending PageRank to those pages anyway but since those pages essentially doesn't exist that PageRank is lost. Addironally, internally links count as votes just like incoming links from other sites do and the anchor text from internal links also help with SEO. By blocking those pages any links on those pages can't help you rank better.

Do not use nofollow on internal links. Also, do not use nofollow on external links that you control.