If Cutts says it's a viable concept (and he has) and somebody Like Stephen Spencer says he's used it, tested it, and found a benefit (and he has)... That's pretty much all I need.
Excerpt from a
Rand Fishkin Q&A where this topic is discussed:
Quote:
"Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? A) Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
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(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.)"
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And a piece of
Stephen's reply to Shari Thurow:
Quote:
Matt Cutts has publicly condoned the use of PageRank sculpting on repeated occasions. Google has even used the technique on their own properties.
So my question to Shari is: "Have you ever conducted any testing of the PageRank sculpting technique?" We at Netconcepts have, and it works.
According to our tests, there are plenty of occasions where it can be a valuable tool, if used wisely. For example, if you have an ecommerce site and the category pages contain 3 links to every single product page -- the product name as a text link, the product image thumbnail as an image link, and the words "View Product" as a text link -- you could nofollow the image and "View Product" links and funnel more PageRank through the much more contextually-relevant product-name-based text links.
"I am always a fan of giving people more flexibility and more tools," Matt said in reference to giving "more flexibility to site owners to sculpt how they want to flow PageRank or to change how the page should be indexed" (quotes from my interview with him at PubCon, published on stephanspencer.com).
So if Shari wrote this piece without any testing, it's just unsubstantiated opinion -- and I wholeheartedly disagree with it. 
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We did a video about the subject with Stephen essentially explaining and endorsing the concept. I have no reservations about the concept based on the credentials of the folks who are endorsing it. Not just Matt and Stephen... I've also heard from Rand,
Michael Gray and several other folks who I have no problem considering authorities.
Nobody's saying you have to use it... nobody's saying you have to necessarily agree with it. But it is a concept that many professionals in this field - who I feel are very knowledgeable and authoritative - have more or less signed off on.
Like most any other
SEO tactic, some people will use it, some won't. There are so many pieces of the puzzle in
SEO that hardly any one single tactic, tip, or trick is going to make or break any
SEO campaign.
Back in school, I'd say you were disputing the concept on the basis that an appeal to authority argument is one of the classic fallacies. ie:
Bob says blue widgets are great.
Bob is a superhero rockstar that everybody loves.
Blue widgets must be great.
Appeal to authority fallacy ( I liked logic class).
However... authority is generally just dandy for propositional and procedural concepts (like
SEO for the most part). If Michael Jordan says:
"This is the best way to shoot a free throw" I am thinking, I can probably trust that shooting free throws like that is generally a pretty good idea.