I think it’s the same with anything in life, everybody is looking for an easy way to get something other people work hard for. SEO is about applying consistent principles and making small changes as you go along. SEO work never really ends as even when your sitting at the top you always need to keep one step ahead of your competitors.

The key sentence in your post: “No matter what anybody says SEO is about driving organic traffic to your site and you do this by ranking highly on Google for relevant keywords.”

Doing the work that is necessary to drive organic traffic is something most people want to avoid. So making a big deal about nofollow allows a lot of people to avoid what needs to be done and lets them waste time with something that for the most part really does not matter.

Thanks for the input. I always link out in posts and only nofollow if I am outing a dodgy site, simple just use a little common sense. The problem form an SEO consultants point of view is that you need to give the best advice to the client and technically by advising nofollow you are advising them to let PageRank evaporate. In my opinion Google have left us with no choice. The rules really haven’t changed, use nofollow to protect your site from unwanted influence.

I also agree that PR is overhyped because they talk about it in forums all the time…