After a few years of being scared of the “nofollow†attribute I have come to accept it and even embrace it! When Google introduced “nofollow†it was intended to stop people from passing Page Rank from one page to the other. Back then Page Rank was weighted fairly heavy in the search result algorithm. Since the introduction of “nofollow†Google has almost phased out the importance of Page Rank totally from their search results pages. This can be seen by sites with a PR of 1 out ranking sites with a PR of 5 or higher (happens a lot now). Also, Google is clearly counting “nofollow†links as backlinks, as can be seen in their own Webmaster Tools. Many of my sites show “nofollow†links as back links! They count! (There is a good chance their weight is less than “dofollow†links, but they do count)/ And lets not forget that Yahoo and MSN ignore the “nofollow†tag! So when marketing a site, fear not the “nofollow†tag. Comment away on NoFollow Blogs! You will get traffic and you will get more higher SERPS in the end! DO NOT LET NOFOLLOW AFFECT YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS!
Yes I agree, When no-follow was introduced it was the exception, now it is almost the rule, which means if Google put a lot of weight on it, then a few sites with do-follow links would dominate.
Thanks for the knowledge. BTW If nofollow is no longer heavy... what is? what can we use to bring up PR?
I've been trying to tell people this for a year now, PR is now just another factor, rather than the be-all-and-end-all of SEO. I first noticed when a site I was working on last year suddently shot up the rankings and overtook many PR5 sites, despite only having a PR of 4 itself. I checked out the links and many of them were NOFOLLOW, yet Google had still picked them up...
Yes indeed google now counts "nofollow" links. I have some links from Yahoo answers pointing back to my sites and they are counted by Google in webmaster tools.
Don’t worry about PR. The only thing that is valuable about PR anymore is when trying to sell links. If you sell links, Google will penalize you and take away your PR making the site less valuable for selling links. So at the end of the day, there is no reason to be concerned with PR!
Yes, google is counting nofollow links as backlinks, but i don't see any PR juice from those links Thanks for the information, repped.
Totally agree with you, even from my past SEO strategies experiments and i have noticed that Nofollow links are valuable as well, and they surely play vital role as a serp booster.
Did you ever find a nofollow link has been counted in G BL;s. I found many times since last couple of months. BTW, major objective of any marketing tactics should be the targeted traffic and optimization of website should be conversion based.
even if the site is a dofollow or a nofollow it's still helps our website... @123addme optimize more your website and use those keywords that you want to rank on yahoo..
Bravo... brilliant post. I've noticed as well that google shows my yahoo answers links even though they're nofollow. Wasn't sure... Thank you for your post
Cool, thanks for the info. Most people still don't bother commenting on blogs with the NoFollow attribute unless they really have something to say so I just made my blog DoFollow
I never did take nofollow very seriously because it's always seemed to have some effect, even if its not as good as do follow. I like to use it for the *internal* PR of my sites - for example I will do-follow my important menu items but then nofollow things like privacy policy or contract forms that I don't want to rank high even if there are links to them on every page.