Why do people always believe that links have to be follow links and not nofollow? I can understand if people want to build PR, but there's a lot more to building links than PR. I think people put too much effort into worrying about what Google thinks of their website. I can tell you one thing. I would rather have 100 nofollow links on popular websites, that actually get seen and clicked on -- rather than all the follow backlinks on the world that don't get seen or clicked on. You know why? Because PR doesn't come just from "links". It also comes from websites traffic. So if you have a lot of nofollow links on other websites, and if they actually get CLICKED on -- the search engines know that your website is getting traffic -- and this, by itself, will increase PR. I'm not saying don't try to get follow links, I am just saying that not all nofollow links are useless. They can also play a major role in your promotion.
I asked google directly about this, they said not to use nofollow link unless its for user submissions on your blog, etc, which might link to a bad site or spam 1000s of links. All it does is tell google not to follow the link and not share page rank with it. I think google has changed the way it works from what I've been told, its a trust thing. If you link to good related sites, google trusts you more, if you link bad sites or lots of random sites you lose that trust. Some people think it loses pagerank from your site if you don't use nofollows? I pretty sure it divides the page rank between links on the page and it also check the CTR (click thru rate) of each link (unless nofollow)? So pages with 1000s of link are worthless compared to a page with a smaller pagerank and only a few links? The 'nofollow' tag don't make sure of a difference unless on a large scale of links. If it's a good site, however, it deserves to be googled!
It's good to have both. If the website is reputable, I wont mind leaving comments for the sake of the readers.
I think a mix of both is good and seems natural to search engines. SO, we should continue doing both.
Quite right. Even is support the no-follow links as they can get you traffic. Do-follow links blogs or directories are full of outbound links and visitors do not entertain much in the comment section as there are huge of them and most of them says "Wow! That was really great post". No-follow blogs are not spammed compared to do-follow and this is how you get much help in ranking your website.
I personally think this dofollow vs nofollow is partly just google PR - trying to get people to operate in one way via smoke and mirrors rather than actual differences. The reason I say this is that in google webmaster tools it still lists a whole heap of nofollow links - and if they weren't relevant or counted at all, then why would they bother listing them? Also, if you have 100% dofollow links and there are a LOT of them, this looks suspect. I personally think at least 20% nofollow links is helpful - or just focus on linkbuilding in general, and only worry about nofollow vs dofollow if there is some form of cost involved beyond your own time.
Of course it's good to have nofollow backlinks, as well as dofollow backlinks, it's very important to have a mix in order for your websites backlinks to look real, the whole point of a backlink is for somebody else to link to your website, not you linking yourself, so just building dofollow backlinks does look odd, compared to having a mix, like a normal every day website has.
"I would rather have 100 nofollow links on popular websites, that actually get seen and clicked on -- rather than all the follow backlinks on the world that don't get seen or clicked on. " you see,if you would have all the dofollow links even if no one clicks on them,google would get you a lot of visitors google have the links in the webmaster tools because it's a link to your site.but,that link won't help you rank in search engines
If your only aim for link building is to become visible and get traffic, I would surely look for high traffic sites to place them... irrespective of them being do-follow or no-follow! Regards, RightMan