Yeah I just found that too... am I missing something or is this seriously bad and making pretty much the whole point of posting there invalid?
I don't think this is correct. AB has always been nofollow. You trying to rank the article and not the site it points to in most cases. Right?
Whoa... !? I'm not really a newb, have been marketing online now for over 2 years and have some well ranked, decent traffic sites, and this goes against what I know - basically that nofollow links don't count as backlinks and won't help you get higher in Google... they are a way for traffic to get to you still but that is all - no ranking advantage... isn't this why there are lists of "dofollow" article sites, blog networks, directories, social bookmarking services etc..?
As far as I knew they didn't used to count as anything in google's eyes, i.e. they wouldn't help to get you either indexed, or ranked. Then around a year or go or so Google changed the way it worked slightly - but still didn't give any value to them in terms of help you get indexed / ranked.. .. The change was the way they worked for webmasters. Previously webmasters could control the weight of the external links they gave - for example if they had 10 external links (with a theoretical 10 page rank points to give out) on a page they could no-follow 5 of them, and the remaining 5 links would give out 2 "page rank points" each to these sites - effectively Google would only see 5 external links on that page to give any ranking value to. But the change meant that now the whole 10 pages are counted and even if you no-follow 5 of them the remaining 5 pages only get "1 point" of value each rather than 2. Just my understanding, might not be spot on, but basically no-follow links still don't realyl do much for you except give traffic access to you..