I know that a nofollow link in Googles eye means that the link will not pass on any page rank juice, however is the link counted at all by Google and if it is counted what is the effect on your rankings? Lets say you have a highly relevant dofollow blog comment PR0 and a highly relevant nofollow blog comment, both have roughly the same content, would the dofollow blog comment pass on a better SERP boost compared to the nofollow? I suppose the question is, will get lots of relevant nofollow links help a link building campaign and SEO efforts?
In theory nofollow shouldn't pass any pagerank juice at all. But I always suspect that Google is definitely passing a small PR even with nofollow links.
nofollow links are shown in webmaster tools, so they are counting them, but god* knows what value they give to them *ummmm....if matt cutts is god:-( horrible thought
I don't think nofollow links gets counted. Googlebot never crawl a link with nofollow attribute. So a nofollow link neither pass page rank juice nor it can help you in SERP rankings. Only use of a nofollow link is, if you get a nofollow link on a high authority site with huge traffic. In this case you can convert a fraction of that traffic to your site.
Just because they show up in Webmaster Tools doesn't mean they are counted or pass any PR. Links that have been devalued because they are coming from known spam sites also show up in Webmaster Tools. Google likely does this because they don't want you to know which links they are counting and which they are not. This is the same reason why the LINK: operator and Webmaster Tools BOTH show only a sample of your inbound links. Why does Google penalize sites that link to bad neighborhood sites? Because they don't want other sites promoting the rankings of bad sites in the SERPs by providing them w/ backlinks and link juice/page rank. How does Google tell you to avoid getting penalized if you link to bad sites? By adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link because it stops the link from being counted and therefore stops the flow of PR (just like redirecting through a page that has been blocked by robots.txt or using a <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" does at the page level). Why would Google tell sites who sell links that they had better add rel="nofollow" or face penalties or even a ban? Because it prevents the paid link from affecting the rankings of the target URL for the link. Cutts and others from Google have stated repeatedly that NOFOLLOW does not pass page rank. Straight from Cutts' mouth: 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.) Evidently there was a period when nofollow somehow still passed Page Rank but I looks to have been fixed in 2007... http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/matt-cutts-confirms-nofollow-fix.html Here is a Cutts video (2nd one on page) where he states clearly that NOFOLLOW links, even those from trusted sites like wikipedia.com, do NOT affect your rankings in any way: http://www.searchnewz.com/latestsearch/senews/sn-4-20090312301RedirectsandNoFollowWithMattCutts.html
Bottom line...don't waste your time posting your links in a no-follow forum, BM site, blog, etc. Now, for an example, if you have written a good article and post it in a NF forum, then it really doesn't matter about a NF since it will gain a lot of traffic and there could be some conversions. But if you want to gain in the SERPs...don't take a chance in a NF forum and find a DF site to post an article or comment in.
Nofollow links, especially in blogs, are still a good source of traffic for a site, but they can never be counted as backlinks.
Now if you use google analyse,you can see that some links google think it is your backlinks and they are no follow,but i think it would not be way of to promotion your PR.
Hi I am glad i found this thread. I have a similar query which i asked here. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=11006622#post11006622 In this case also, a no follow link is showing in the back link.
As far as i am concerned No follow only affects your pagerank They are counted for rankings but the weightage is much lesser in comparison to another text link from a relevant webpage due to the spam comments
I dont believe they do anything at all. a while back we built a blog, removed the auto-ping, put up about ten half decent posts and built sh*tloads of nofollow links to it. it never got indexed in 5 months. so we turned ping back on, got it indexed, and built some more nofollow comments. it doesn't rank for anything, even it's own name. forget about nofollow for ranking purposes, its not some Google trick on us, they really dont do anything
I also dont believe that no follow helps but there are many websites which links are worthy even if they are no follow and it helps in backlinks such as yahoo answer
The true value of using nofollow links imo is when u get them from sites that are relevant to your niche. At that point, they might generate return traffic.
ranking can't be up through no follow links.it just good for traffic purposes.but over SERP nofollow links have no effect.
Agreed. A little off topic, but be on the look out for high PR sites that are mainly NF but have DF loopholes: RSS tag feeds out of Technorati e.g. behavioral modeling (you need a browser that supports the feed: moniker to see this. Google seems to finds these pages.) RSS feeds into Facebook pages e.g. Agilent ADS. Digg. LinkedIn. Hive 411 Community-polled Directory Great thread by the way! I rep'd all the substantial follows ups