You know I really don't understand nofollow seeing as I swear I'm getting credit for Wikipedia links and those are never supposed to count.
Wikipedia has tons of #1 results and if they own a lot of your keyword's SERPS you might be getting referral traffic from their top listings. The reason they have most of those results is that they pass the high page rank around their own site and not pass it to others through external links. Page Rank has to have something to do with SERPS and they are using nofollow to their advantage and giving themselves better results through internal linking. Even if a link is set to nofollow, you can still get good referral traffic from their site though. I am confused with webmaster tools though, you would think it would not index it as a backlink since it did not follow it. Perhaps though they do just count it as a backlink and just not pass any of the juice. That is going to suck to try and figure out what backlinks actually count and which are doing nothing for you in terms of your SERP, that is for sure Just my 2 cents.
I agree, I don't use "nofollow" on any of my blog comments because I believe it's only fair reward sincere commentors. If a comment is spam or junk, I just delete it. As for my original topic, I've seen it happen again, the passing of pagerank (well, pagerank is pretty much dead, so let's say "linkjuice"), anyway, I got some passed regardless of a nofollow from an older siteof mine to a breand new site. I was testing my theory that nofollow is being ignored and it seems to be true. Well, whatever Google is doing right now, I'm very pleased. all my hard work and honest linking is finally paying off in SERPs.
if they were being actully counted as anything and not simply followed though i think you'd notice in the serps with pr8 and 9 backlinks. So if they're not counted who cares about this issue.
Nofollow is a must for blog comments because it is rediculous to think that blog comments should be calculated in the site's PR. This is not the intention of the algorithm.
comments shouldn't have a nofollow because mostly they're an extension of your content. it's just unfair to "punish" your readers for adding content to your site. besides spam and nofollow have nothing to do with each other. ever stopped a spam comment by using nofollow? it's more effectiv to delete spam or don't let bots post on your site by using captcha or something like that.
Where does it say that the links in webmaster tools count for anything? As a matter of fact on Matts blog he describes it quite well. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-provides-backlink-tool-for-site-owners/ "Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight."
If you don't mind 6 hours of comment moderation a day this is not a big deal. HAHA! While I tend to agree it would be great if I could take nofollow off my blog comments, but too many people have raped the idea of using comments to get links. However, if you can afford the moderation time it takes. Taking nofollow off should boost your blog popularity in some ways. I think I might try it on lobo links just to see if it really makes a difference.
nofollow links are still backlinks but do not count on Google PR Update. You won't get any PR from them
I think if we use nofollow means in that blog it give importance to that blog and links in that website doesn't have backlinks
I believe the backlinks in the Google Webmaster tools work the same as the Yahoo backlinks: No follow tags are shown, simply because it found a link, this is just for the interested user, however google does NOT follow the links as has been confirmed FREQUENTLY in the past!
Whoa, so I don't get the PR on a blog comment, and my anchor text is diluted because my name links to my site?
My understanding and testing shows that spiders do follow a no follow link and even show it as a backlink (after all it is a link) but it is no longer counted as a vote and is disregarded for ranking purposes.
Like others have said, the link is still followed... it's a LINK after all. It can still get a page indexed. It just doesn't pass juice. If you don't want a page indexed then mark it noindex. I wouldn't pass juice on forms either. It doesn't get rid of spam, but certainly reduces it since they know they get nothing out of in terms of increasing their crap PR. There's also the fact that it "bleeds" PR from the forum site on a grand scale if nofollow isn't used. It's a great "tool" to control the link-juice to pages on your own site as well. Who the heck wants to pass reputation to an About Me page?
Never noticed nofollow links in google webmaster tools but i have noticed that yahoo does index nofollow backlinks... Like previously said though none of the link goodness gets passed on. But saying that some search engines simply ignore the nofollow tag and treat it as a normal link.