rel="nofollow" at the module level?

I've been reading about nofollow and found some 'external nofollow' information on a Google blog. I then started to wonder, is it possible to implement a nofollow in the heading section of individual modules without the nofollow impacting an entire page?  Does that make sense? Would it even work?

My thought process is that,as you know, I have a half dozen pages on my site that list affiliate links and the like; I read that external links all come at the expense of (or share, per se) your Google rankings (i.e., the more external links you have, the worse your site ranks), so I thought that perhaps I could use a few nofollows at the individual html/text  module level.

I could put nofollow in the page heading, but then it would impact the whole page. I could also manually attach it to each link preceding the 'a href' with the 'a rel=', but that would be more trouble than it's worth. ;)

Thoughts?

[follow-up] I have some links in Wikipedia, who uses nofollow for all their pages, and they are showing up on my list of backlinks? I thought the nofollow would prevent me from getting 'backlink credit?' I am now even more confused...

Well, curiosity got the best of me and I went to see about using nofollow at the page level.  I guess it is a valid keyword for the meta robots tag, but it's not very effective in keeping pages from being indexed since every page anywhere that links to the page will cause google to index it, so it's better to use Robots.txt

Here's some info on that http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-protocol.html

Your question was in the context of linking to another page without passing on PR though, so maybe it will help in that regard.

Here is another bit of info about rel="nofollow"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Thanks, John. I'm still trying to digest all of this and have more research to do.

The rel=’external nofollow’ might serve me well at the page level, as I am not sure you can use nofollow in a module header and have it work as designed...never heard of the 'external' variant until I read about it on a Google employee's blog and in some SEO forums.

My thought here was that for pages that have a ton of affiliate links, I would use a nofollow to help mitigate any negative impact from having external links...can't see giving Priceline or the other affiliates unneeded PR. :) For the forums, blog, link exchanges, et al, I am not concerned.

How about this: Is there a way to format the way URLs are handled in the FCK editor? It would be nice if it can be modified to insert the tag before the href tag like:

 <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.example.com/">Text >

...or even a global find and replace, replacing with

 <ahref...> with <arel="nofollow"href...>

Perhaps I am thinking too much into this anyway. If PR is calculated on a per page basis, then the issue is moot, I guess, as the affiliate pages with the links can take a hit anyway...trying to get the home page up there and use an internal linking scheme for the internal pages, if that makes sense.

Perpetuating the conspiracy...one post as a time!  Add another 3rd party module to my list.  Thanks, John; I am now part of the Snapsis family! 

A friend positioned my obsession with PR as such: if you can get 1st page Google and have a PR0, would you then care about PR? PR and $1.95 gets you a cup of coffee. I've adjusted my thinking accordingly.

I'm sure I'll be in the PB forums once I do something with it...plan to wait until the site is finished and I enter clean-up/polish/SEO mode. :)