when commenting in news sites for the sake of SEO link Building, I find it discourage when I see a Nofollow attribute, despite that, I still comment, say something relevant, put my link and move on. but I am not 100% sure that these links don't count in SEO. first - they show in G.Webmaster tools. second - they get your pages quickly indexed. third reason is that I have once built a blog for a local nitch. put some reasonably quality content in it, linked it well. but all the links were planted in a "Nofollow attribute" webpages yet it still ranked. it ranked from amongst very high quality domains what you would call the top competitors to that blog. why did the blog rank? it had a unique content! not true. it had high social interaction (face.. Likes & G +1s) ? not true. because it had a number of links that came from a high quality authority websites? but they were all a NoFollow links. my question is simply, can we be certain that the links put in a "Nofollow attribute" webpages, do not have any value for the SEO?. reading Lyndon Antcliff on "commenting and link building" he says this *Some SEO “experts†will see say, “nofollowâ€, doesn’t pass juice. End of. This is a mistake.* share your experience on Nofollow here guys. what do you think we should do in order to outsmart this ''attribute'' ?.
From Matt Cutts who works for Google: "In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext [*]. [*] Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a nofollow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results." - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
I agree with the above post.., may be the blog ranked because of its domain name. Domain name might be keyword based one.., so it has higher chance of being ranked in google..,
I think that there is also relevance with where the nofollow link is coming from. But it’s true that it does not help A LOT in ranking your page. I think it has to do with the niche’s competition and on-page optimization. In the case of your blog, is it still ranking up to now? Try to check the competition as well, sometimes even if you’re not building links to the niche you still get a high rank because your direct competition is not doing good. In conclusion, it is also important to build “nofollow links†to make your link building as natural as possible. At least 1 out of 20 links will do.
they absolutely have value especially if they have relevant anchor text. Remember the majority of GENUINE user contributed links are going to be no-follow, while SEO purposely posted links, link exchangeswith high PR sites and such will be dofollow and will look unnatural