I'm a newbie so please be patient with me.. Isn't it that rel='nofollow' an instruction to the google spider or crawler not to count such link as a back link? If the backlink in our profile signature seem to work 'coz it redirects a person to our individual site, what good it will do if there is a rel='nofollow' ?
Not sure if were referring to DP profile signature links or were trying to be generic, all (unless there is an exception) profile links on DP forum are do-follow and hence they guide the Google (and other SE bots) to your signature links just as normal human readers. But if a link is no-followed then it may not offer much value to your link (from a page rank perspective). But still, even a no-followed link can always drive human readers to your site and if your content is appealing then some of them may link to you; thus helping your link. So if I were you, I would probably want to have as many quality links as I can - no-followed or otherwise... Hope this helped.
For sure some of the other search engines ignore "no-follow" attributes, so don't worry about those tags...
You must check what Google have to say about rel='nofollow' They tell you how do they treat this links & why.
if a link is rel='nofollow' then you won't get Link juice from this page. So these links won't help you to increase your Google page rank. But Yahoo and Bing count noFollow links. Also you need to have both noFollow and doFollow links to make your link building process looks natural.
"rel=nofollow" means a crawler can't go through it, but a human can..You can try whether a link is "do or no". If you search for the link in google if it is dofollow it will display the corresponding page (or) if it is nofollow ---then displays as a plain text
Yes, i agree that DP is a do-follow forum but i have another site whose links of DP is being showed No follow links. i could not understant that why this DP forum is showing no follow what you think.
i read before a research. The researcher actually build a lot of no folllow link to his website, at the end, the website listed in top 10 of the search keyword he target. (he try on non competative keyword) still can drive you organic traffic