The grooming node has the capability of grooming multicast traffic with the small granularity into established light at high cost of complexity and node architecture. In the paper, a grooming nodes optimal allocation (GNOA) method is proposed to optimize the allocation of the grooming nodes constraint by the blocking probability for multicast traffic in sparse WDM networks. In the proposed GNOA method, the location of each grooming node is determined by the SCLD strategy. The improved smallest cost largest degree (SCLD) strategy is designed to select the nongrooming nodes in the proposed GNOA method. The simulation results show that the proposed GNOA method can reduce the required number of grooming nodes and decrease the cost of constructing a network to guarantee a certain request blocking probability when the wavelengths per fiber and transmitter/receiver ports per node are sufficient for the optical multicast in WDM networks.