I know nofollow links are useless, but I was wondering if it could have a negative impact on the ranking of your site? What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance.
No,You must have some no follow links in order to make your link graph natural. No-follow links are not completely useless.
No follow links are still valuable for your website. Although it doesn't pass up page rank this type of links are still backlinks and still counted to create a natural background for you. Sometimes no follow backlinks drives even better traffic than do follow ones.
Imagine how your site's link portfolio would look to Google if you only had links from dofollow sites and even links just from high Pagerank sites. Wouldn't it look completely unnatural? So, you should get links from dofollow as well as nofollow sources. You should also get links from high PR sites and low PR sites to appear natural. Any website which gets links naturally, will get from many different sources. So, you too should have a mixture for best results. Hope that answers your question.
Nofollow and dofollow make natural links! Building only dofollow links is suspicious to Google! Nofollow links may send some visitors to your site as well, and traffic is also one factor in SEO.
NOfollow links wont hurt your search engine rankings. But it gives traffic to your site. So there is no problem with NOfollow links.
You should KEEP them... No matter they are no-follow, you NEED no-follow links to Google will see that your website follow a WHITE-HAT SEO strategy! Because if you have only Do-Follow backlinks, then this is unnatural according to Google and he could suspect you for 'cheating'! For example 75% dofollow and 25% dofollow if you are really a good webmaster that want to rank high, otherwise 50%-50% is normal for most websites... Because webmasters not only try to get a better ranking, but also get a few extra tagetted (in most cases!) visitors!
Here is a direct answer from Google http://www.reconsiderationrequests.net/google-hangouts/17-June-2013.php?#Q1
Unlike most algorithmic penalties, it’s pretty easy to tell whether or not you’ve been hit by the unnatural link penalty. As long as you had Webmaster Tools set up at the time when you got hit, you should have received a very specific message from Google.
I don't think it has a negative effect on your site. I have a website wherein most of its backlinks are from my comments on other internet marketers' blogs. Most of these links are nofollow. However, when I checked my analytics, I actually get more traffic because of these nofollow links and my site's ranking is still great. Therefore, having nofollow links does not affect your site's rankings. Fact of the matter is these backlinks do help you generate more traffic.
When I do link building of my sites, I don't care of dofollow or nofollow, if you use only dofollow links your link profile wouldn't look natural, and it is doubtful to Google as well.
No, nofollow links won't hurt you. Google doesn't like unnatural links that pass PR and tells you to add the nofollow attribute to paid links etc.