Dubious use of nofollow or is it?

[billshorters]

A competitor has added the rel="nofollow" attribute to every external
link on their site. It is a very large site with thousands of external links to quality sites which they have built up over years. This has nothing to do with comment spam and I can only imagine that they believe this will improve their rankings by hoarding pagerank.

What effect if any will it have on their rankings? Improve? Worsen? No change?

[pokersearch]

I put the tag on affliate links recently on one site. I dont know if it really helps. My thought behind it was that they pay my for customers, not to help them out rank me.
I dont know the answer to your question, however I do recall reading, likely on here that a lot of out going links to quaility sites can help your ranking, as an authority.

[evilgreenmonkey]

My best guess is that they were linking to some sites which were less reputable and their CMS has an "all or nothing" approach to making WYSIWYG editor style links.