Are nofollow links useful?

That´s a point I have been thinking about for a long time: are nofollow links (from blogs or other websites) useful for seo or not? Everybody says, that nofollow links are not followed by search enginge spiders, so they have no effect on the search enginge rankings. But I think, that link building by using ONLY dofollow links is not natural. So Google finds all the links pointing to your website, but doesn´t follow the nofollow links. But can´t it be possible, that Google realizes the nofollow links anyway and that it´s positive for your google rankings if you got some nofollow links (because that´s a natural way of link building)? Or in other words: every website which only got dofollow backlinks used search engine optimization (and that´s a thing Google doesn´t like)?

What do you think?

 

NoFollow backlinks are useful because they make your link profile to look more natural to Google.
Furthermore you will still get a boost in other search engines likes Yahoo and Bing, not to mention the traffic.

 

Agreed, it's believed Google doesn't index pages marked as "nofollow", Yahoo does follow but ignore them in ranking calculation, Bing ignore in ranking calculation too but it's not a proven fact that follows or not the provided link.

Ciao

 

You know I'm sitting here looking at Google Webmaster's Tools and I'm having noindex'ed links listed as linking back to my site. (Mostly in blog comments and forums)

I still wondered about this. I know what's said officially but I see time and time again evidence that this isn't always true.

 

I don't care about nofollow or dofollow what is important to me is relevant traffic. Besides, you don't know what nofollow links Google may be passing with link juice so save yourself the hassle and get links for traffic, not for SEO reasons.

 

great! will look into my Webmaster console, too. Will let you know if I notice the same behaviour for my sites

 

NoFollow links are good if the site has a lot of human traffic.

 

I do not know about it but i think it is useful.

 

I did check this morning my Webmaster console, I have one domain that may benefit from nofollow links but maybe it's a bit too young and forum backlinks haven't surfaced yet. Anyway I'll monitor it on a weekly basis, thanks for hint

 

there are other search engines beside google that count nofollow links. so the answer is yes, any backlink counts

 

Yes they are
I have a say "Any link can help as long as it's a link"

 

By making comments on blogs with high traffic you can get a lot of visitors to your own blog. Even if the comment links are nofollow, yet you can get targeted traffic. So it may be worth doing sometimes.

 

It is debatable.

Some people say it is worth getting nofollow links, some people say it is not.

I personally like a mixture of the 2.

 

some people says that no follow links are useless... because google doesn't count them...

 

heres a thing i tried , now although a link is no follow it should still show up on a page or comment in a blog,so some blogs forums do not accept you putting li nks on them so heres a way round it when you sign up fpr a blog use your website address instead of a user name example instead of putting coolerchoice as your name put http://www.coolerchoice, this way google will still add your site in search, this method works as i tried it on a few .gov blogs and my site name got indexed in search engines from that site

 

This is a recent blog posts from Matt Cutts' blog. This will give you more insight as how Google treats NoFollow links nowadays.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

 

Interesting reading, thanks for sharing

 

Google don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes google to drop the target links from their overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in google index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap.

 

You may want to review the Matt Cutt's article linked to up there as he states that Google does in fact follow such links now. They just don;t get as much credit as such links not marked.

 

yes! no follow links give you good return as well.