Why mark article links as nofollow?

[Rodent]

I do not understand why people rip off content from article directories and then mark the links in the author box as nofollow.

Now I could understand if they took off the links (less leakage from their site), or replaced them with links of their own (even better), but as far as I can see, leaving the outgoing links intact but marking them as nofollow gains them nothing at all while the link still represents leakage of link love even if this means it goes down the "nofollow" shit-chute rather than to someone else. Given that doing this invites DMCA notices to their hosting company and possible loss of the site, this doesn't make any sense.

Can anyone enlighten me. Have I missed something here or is it simply that there are a lot of dickheads out there who have no idea what they are doing?

Thanks

 

[careybaird]

People do believe that nofollow links don't count towards link love leakage.

The more outgoing links you have on your page (internal and external) the more your link love is spread thin. So what people tend to do is nofollow both internal and external links.

It is open to debate if this helps or not but I do it - if I am link to wikipedia in a blog post, I nofollow it. In my footer links to privacy policy etc. I nofollow them.

Hope that helps you understand the methodology, but they are still dickheads for using your content and not giving you proper credit IMO