An Experiment: Nofollow Links DO Pass Value and Rankings in Google

Hey Brian,
Love to see experiments like this. Of course on the Internet it is almost impossible to run real research because of the lack of a control environment, but I think you did a great job of eliminating variables.

We have run our own, small, in-house tests over the last couple of years and always conclude the same -- NoFollow links can help with rankings.

It would have been interesting to see you run a third test and only get links from spammy comments on blogs that are loaded with spammy comments. Hopefully the results would show that spam does not work, but I fear the opposite is true.

Arnie

I can verify this... I stumbled on this while link building for a client recently. Great info.

Ryan Rose
Department of Search

That's a fantastic experiment! I'm super impressed and really glad to hear the results. I have to agree with Jill that there is a lot of linking data out there behind the link condom, and since the Goog uses links to :

1. Find new content
2. Attribute popularity
3. Get keyword (anchor text) clues

That they certainly just couldn't ignore that whole section of the net, as it's still valuable ranking data.

Again, thanks for all your work you put into this post...awesome.

Hi Bart,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I do believe I left out some data which I'll include in the original post above.

We did run SEO Majestic, SEOmoz' Linkscape, and another internal backlinks checking tool that we built ourselves. The backlinks to these couple of sites were 100% nofollow and no scraper sites. SEO Majestic was run 3 times during the experiment, which the last one being one week after the final nofollow links were acquired.

The descriptions and examples of the keywords we ranked for are now added to the post above. I think adding this does make it a more solid analysis. I appreciate your posting prompting the addition on our part. :)

Excellent post Brian! David Leonhardt did a similar test last year, which I discussed at http://www.seoverflow.com/link-building/why-you-should-build-nofollow-li... if you'd like to read it.

I'm convinced that noFollow links do pas son some relevancy, pr value and linkjuice..

thanks for sharing!

Alex, Darren, Tom Jay, and Robin - Thanks for posting your comments!

Alex, I read your article. It was spot on to what we also found, mainly that relevance is still being passed and that Google seems to be changing their interpretation of nofollowed links depending on various factors.

Tom, we purposely block several of the "your site is worth..." sites we know of that attempt to fetch our sites. *We did not catch one that I see in a normal search for one of our test domains in Google but our test domain was not linked to as the external site only used the direct domain name, i.e. ourtestdomain.com. This didn't impact anything since our anchor text and keywords we were linking with were not at all related to the domain name.

Hello Bizior, thanks for stopping by and commenting.

Yeah, even till this morning the rankings are still holding strong for these few sites we were building nofollow links to.

For blocking those "your site is worth..." parasites one of my programmers added this to the .htaccess files for those sites:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^sitenamebothere [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^sitenamebothere

I'd need to ask him what the bot names are but this works like a charm since not all of these bots/scrapers will adhere to robots.txt directives. You just need to plug in the bot name and that's it!

Here what Google says about "nofollow" links and I believe it's true: "In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web."

Thanks for presenting your results. You just confirmed my suspicion that I shouldn't be wasting time worrying about nofollow, but instead blasting my crap to every blog, wiki and social site in existence. Cheers :)

Hello Bryan, nice test, well done!

However, I've still some doubt about your results and, especiall, to better appreciate your test methodology, would be possible to know:

1) did any of the internal page of your domain #1 and #2 got any internal (dofollow) links from the home pages and/or from any other page of your domain1# or 2#? What I mean is if any of test page got any internal dofollow link from the same domain?

2) Do any of the "domain1.com/specific-air-conditioning-rating-type" url contain any keyword you've tried to rank for (i.e. if checked ranking for "foo" , was "foo" in the page url - ie. domain1.com/foo-yes ) ?

3) Have you still recently checked with Google webmaster tool if you've got any Dofollow link from scraper/spammy pages? Because what sees Google is not what Yahoo and/or Seo Majestic can see.

Hi Brian,
Thanks for sharing your tests with the world. This is valuable; however when performing reverse engineering tests it's better to isolate the other factors that might influence the results.
If you could create a unique keyword phrase that is no where on the web - not even on the page that you are trying to rank for (thus excluding on page SEO as a factor) and then use it as anchor text in a no followed link or as many no followed links as possible. And then after a few weeks go to Google and do the command allinanchor:"unique keyword phrase" and get a result then I believe that would be isolating the hundreds of other factors and proving that no follow gives ranking value.
I have performed this kind of isolating tests for no follow links and have not gotten any results that give value to no follow for ranking.
All the best,
Eren

This was a really interesting lead and finally provides some convincing evidence on the benefit of dofollow leads. I feel that far too many SEO processes are based on opinions rather than solid evidence and facts. Case in point is various HTML elements like H1, alt tags etc. which every says helps your rankings but I've never seen a controlled test which proves it beyond doubt.

Great catch. I'd figured as much, but never spent the time to prove it.

The next thing you know, we'll be realizing that 'sharing data' and adding goal values in Google Analytics was the biggest mistake we could have ever made as search marketers.

Great article. I'm link building for a number of clients and also tracking a firm that is link building for a friend of mine. This firm is getting links from off topic forum profiles and off topic blog commenting (spamming). Initially results were ok, the site moved up the rankings but has no ground to a halt. I was never comfortable with what they are doing and am sticking to ethical link building as I feel the results will be better in the long run. I also believe the nofollow links I'm getting are delivering results. A lot of these nofollow links are from forums and blogs which are used by my target audience so are important wether they are nofollow or dofollow. I think overall it's best not to obsess over nofollow and just get the links from the relevant sites.

Wow! What a great read. The whole 'mystery' of what Google likes/doesn't like is mind-bendingly frustrating. (But hey, as you said "It would definitely not benefit Google to tell the web community to go out and get as many nofollow links as possible since it would open up doors for more spam and gaming in Google.")

So...

This article with this painstaking research is REALLY appreciated.

You have encouraged me to get involved in forums, and participate in the debates. Even with no-follow forums like this one! :-)

Seriously... thank YOU!

Cheers,

Jerry

I think the most important factor for no-follow links is, that you DO need them. If not for anchor text or trust value, you need them to have a natural link profile. Look at some of the great brands that got links naturally as they are very popular. 2%-8% of their links are no-follow too. So, No-follows are needed for sure!

Hi Brian,Awesome experiment. Congratulations on helping shed some light on an argument that has been going on between SEO's for a long time.Personally I aim to get links from both do & nofollow links to allow for a natural link building profile.At the end of the day, as link volume is also important, why not get as many links as possible, irrespective of wether they are follow or not? 

Nice experiment, thank you for sharing. I find that anything Matt Cutts suggests needs to be tested as quite often reality has nothing to do with what he preaches. I guess this is also part of his job... But part of our job is to test! Well done Brian!

It's been a while since your test. I'd be curious how the test search terms are holding up. Also, what were the types of links you built:

-Facebook/other social media
-Blogs
-Forums
-Directories
-Article Sites
etc.

I'm curious if the quality of the links have an effect, particularly if social media types of links hold longer term ranking influence.

Hi Brian, It was really interesting to read your article about nofollow links. I am a real beginner at this and stated a website selling office furniture in Australia.
As I had plenty of time on my side I decided to do the SEO myself. After a few months I have ended up with about a 50/50 split with follow and no follow links. At first I was a bit worried about the nofollow but as soon as my site started to appear in google and rise in the pages I felt this must be a natural mix and reading your article has put my mind at rest.
Cheers, Dave

Nice finding from this story. Though links have the attribute of NoFollow, they can still count as outbound links to our site. In retrospect, NoFollow blogs can still be viable for link building.

I use a mix of both nofollow and follow, it helps it look more natural and not just a personal seo tactics.

I don't get it. The nofollow attribute should be suppressed. It totally doesn't matter if a backlink is nofollow or dofollow.

Very interesting tests, thank you for sharing the information. I was wondering the following example: The dofollow link from website A to website B is transferring rank juice. If there is too many open links will this lead to lower PR for website A. And in your case nofollow link gives a benefit for website B without lowering the level of PR at website A, is this correct ?

Very interesting indeed. I've always made comments on blogs that give both follow and nofollow links. I've found this has always worked for me, now you've given us proof that nofollow links do have an impact on rankings!!

In my experience it seems to work, answered a question on AolAnswers (very high authority) then I linked to anwer page with Amplfiy.

About 3 days later I was #5. It seems like it can actually work better if the site has high authority if the term is not too competitve.

Great experiment & researched, I heard nofollow backlink does not pass link juice, but you did great job by explaining every thing . :)

Very interesting experiment. I would like to say that it is very difficult to find do-follow blogs of high quality now. Especially when it comes to such domain extensions as .edu or .gov or .org But I would like to say that I comment both do and no follow blogs related to my resource. Comments made on popular blogs generate high ammounts of targeted traffic that is monetized easily. That's why I have concluded that it makese sense to comment all topic related blogs. Now, it is also pleasure to hear that do-follow links also have a positive impact on search engine rankings of a website as well. Thanks for a great experiment and useful information provided!

i'm sorry to pop out an old article
I also running an experiment on my blog, i just try the live link method versus non live link method, with nofollow tag n live link, i've got pr 2 for my blog.

i just waiting for next google page rank update to see how non live link effect to link juice.

thanks

"Google may not "count" the link as a weighted backlink but this doesn’t mean they ignore the anchor text being used or the authoratative status of the website being linked from"

-> Nice summary.

First, thanks for the outstanding research. We all grow when we share information with each other.

There is a lot of misinformation (even from Google...) regarding no-follow links. Do you have plans to keep testing this? We know definitively to not ignore no-follow linking opportunities in your vertical/domain.

- Tom

It's great I came across this link while trying to find out if I should create a link nofollow. I am new to this link building. Actually this socialseo site is a great site to bookmark and learn more. Thanks.

Do-follow link still counted. My site's backlinks mostly came from no-follow blogs and forums but it still ranked for specific keywords. I think, do-follow as a ranking factor is no longer applied by Google.

After what you found about the nofollow links having a positive impact on sites, there is no point in using it. I am just not gonna worry about it, will link from a mix and that way Google can never argue with link diversity.

Great experiment, that's a great help definitely gives some insight for how worthwhile linkbuilding is!

We did some experimenting like this ourselves and we had the same result. Even no follow links can cause traffic to your site to they you should not exclude them when doing link building.

Really cool experiment and really, a great post. I was just doing some research to see whether there's any value passed via nofollow attribute. It seems, it is still important to include nofollow links into your link profile. Thanks.

Ignoring nofollow links in a link building campaign is a bad idea. Google is looking for natural links and the majority of natural links are nofollow. Ignoring them in a link building campaign is mistake in my opinion.

Very nicely done! I have suspected that something - maybe not full value "link juice" but at least some level of relevance - was passed even through nofollow links. But i have never had the time or opportunity to thoroughly test. When link building, I try to get followed links, of course, but I won't pass up a nofollow link from a good site that is very appropriate - mostly because actual visits may come as a result, but also because that there just may be some SEO benefit too. Thanks for this analysis!

I agree, Matt Cutts’ statement should be elaborated upon. Maybe he should try explaining why some no follow links can be seen in Webmaster Tools.

I really enjoyed this article and think i've read it before. With the majority of sites in my niche using the no follow attribute it becomes very frustrating to build links and the majority i do build are no follow. It's good to know I may not be wasting my time. I guess it would make sense that once google has ranked the pages with all the lovely links it then needs to rank the rest of the sites and maybe 100 no follow links will put you above the next site that has 70 no follow links. I don't know but your post helps to boost my link building motivation. I've read a few posts now that have carried out similar experiments and each one reports the same findings. Thanks :)

Thanks for the great case study, it is great to see this kind of empirical research being done and then presented in such a clear manner. Very scientific and I admit, encouraging results.

I plan on running a similar experiment with a couple of fresh domains and see if I can replicate the findings. I appreciate you sharing your work with the rest of us; keep up the excellent work.

Thanks for the Post!

This is one of the greatest experiment I've been searching for. Here in our field (SEO), we do have lots of confusion regarding link building specially the issue about the no-follow link. Is it really worth in building no follow link or we'll just wasting our time doing this. But on this experiment, we can barely see that there is really a weight (although not much weight) in no-follow links. In my own opinion, building links should always be balanced. If you're building do follow links, you also must have no-follow links to ensure that G will give you authority.

Excellent post. I've never even thought about running a test like that to help figure out whether nofollow links still help. Have you tried running this similar test again, now that it is 2012? It'd be interesting to see how things have changed (or haven't changed).

Interesting findings (I wonder if they're still valid in 2012, though). When adding comments to blogs I never ignore the no follows, if only for the fact that it may look suspicious if every backlink to your site is dofollow. Seems like a natural link pattern would include a mixture, so whether it passes any benefit or not I like to throw some in there anyway.

Im wondering is it still like this?
My boss argues otherwise and Google have made several changes since 2010. Anyone know some newer studies of this scenario?

They tell us that no follow links don't work but they do. I continue to liken SEO to witchcraft because their are so many black, white and grey tactics that do and dont have impact. Blogs are the gold standard to drive SEO however with the time it takes to create them... may as well stick to backlinks on high PR sites.

Very interesting. I've got quite a few links to one of my websites on Wikipedia (which uses nofollow for external links) and always assumed it wouldn't help for my page value. Good to know that it does!

Have you ever seen nofollow links show up in Google's Webmaster Tools? That would be an interesting thing to look at, because if they show up there, then Google is definitely counting them for something.

Wow, So many times I have heard people just saying 'forget about do follow links' or 'do follow links have now value for SERP's'.

Some great evidence though, Changed my view on NoFollow Links.

I was wondering the same answer, As me my self noticed that some great nofollow site's that i love and just use them to share my pics and articles, increasing my site value, I rechecked if I am mistaken, but then found my link was in nofollow attribute, that's really a great experiment you guys perform to help many people.

Interesting point.. What probably matters (in case with nofollow links) is not the link itself, but the mention of some domain somewhere else on the web. Obviously, if the mention is just a spammy comment link (lol) it's not much of a signal. So, it may be reasonable to assume, that the nofollow links which you've built might have affected the ranking results as they send relevance signals to Google (again, I can't be 100% sure as I'm not a Googlebot). Anyway, it's pointless to figure out how googlebot (and search algorithm works), simply because it's not going to get you anywhere, unless, you have something on your website what people can link to, interract with, or your website provides genuine value. In such cases - links will come naturally... and that works all the time. p.s. Funny to see how people keep commenting on this post.. (for some mysterious reason... :) )

I have long wondered this and have tried my own experiments. Mine were slightly less conclusive, or rather dramatic, than yours but they still resulted in an increase in rankings.

I think that No Follow links do aid rankings but only in a minor way (when compared with Do Follow links). So, I have tentatively concluded that No Follow links represent a percentage of a Do Follow link. Only a small percentage but a percentage nevertheless.

In addition to this, No Follow links have the benefit of driving reliant traffic.

Thanks for this great article! I'm currently doing the same testing. I had the same hypothesis.

I found out if you look at the code at most CMS platforms the rel="nofollow" is telling the platforms not to follow links in the comments. I don't think its not following links in the name. Most people try to post links in the commets. This is why CMS platforms implement this in commenting. In SEO a anchor text links for your particular keyword is a very powerful one way links. Its tells google this page is about this particular keyword. Most people don't understand googles algorithm formula is much more advance. Example if you have an anchor text "Dogs" and it leads to a page about dogs and people stay on that site and bookmark it. Then that tells google that this page is on "dogs" because they clicked on a link "dogs" and went to this page and the person stayed on it. So the algorithm looks at many different things.

My Test:

I had one page targeting 3 main keywords with page rank of 0 I did the best on page seo I could.

I was on page 10, 7 and 5 for my 3 keywords

I used the name "photography marketing" on blogs mostly CMS platforms with rel="nofollow" on links in comments. I used my landing page that I was doing my SEO on. I posted about 5 comments and in few days I went from page 10 to page 6 and page 5 to 3 so it does work just don't post a link in the comment.

This really clears things up for me. I have thought for a long time as well, how and why would Google just avoid all of that nofollow data? It doesn't make sense and although I have been apprehensive in the past at even "wasting" my time to make nofollow links, I now feel confident that I am adding value to my website in this way. Thank you!

I'm pretty sure that Google's PR team states nofollow links don't matter so spam is less encouraged. If people thought they didn't matter or weren't effective, they would be less willing to use them, too.

I was doing some research into no follow links. I am curious too to see how effective this would be in the era of Panda & Penguin. I think actually that Google is correct, no follow does work as they say.

What we cannot predict is how people click through to content and what they share. Thus any form of discovery is likely to increase your rankings, even accidental stumbling. It could be the case that Google tracking is a little too smart for its own good and giving extra value to things from something other than link juice. There are many signals we don't know that may be used to determine rankings.

on my website, i have all links to without nofollow tag, is it harm to my website ?

Very Interesting indeed, it would be good to show a majesticseo page or something with the nofollow links. I'm gunna put this on Warrior Forums where everyone is always banging on about getting dofollow links and forgetting about nofollow

I had a link building plan that was for about 80% no-follow links. After the penguin update we noticed our pagerank fell from a 1-0, I would love to see the result of this testing with the new algorithmic updates. Anyone got any recent tests

I really enjoyed reading about this experiment. I am not a webmaster or an SEO by even a long stretch, but as a local, independent financial adviser I have found it very difficult to achieve ranking for our site, and have not found a company that I believe could really help us.

I am trying to provide helpful commentary on other blogs, but with the time invested it's really good to know whether or not I am wasting my time commenting on a nofollow blog. Especially when there aren't a whole lot of well-ranked "dofollow" blogs out there about money and investing. It's great to see that I might not be!

As a control, it would have been a good idea for a third website without any links pointing to it, because if nofollow links have no value a site with only nofollow links should rank in a similar way to a site with no links pointing to it at all.

They are still valuable in terms of it being a link. You have to remember, a link is still a link, which will get you traffic. Also, there are indications that nofollow links still can affect you in the SERPs.

My personal opinion on No Follow links is that Google is not lying in saying that it doesnt directly pass page rank or link juice specifically, however like always i feel google are being "economical" with the truth in that its not also adding that whilst the above is true No follow links as whole ARE a ranking factor in their algorithm ... quite what is of course the 64 million dollar question .... i suspect its along the lines of a certain % of links should be nofollow in any back link footprint or that they are viewed as a whole and given a score within the alogithm.

I’ve used pinterest to optimize my site and the result was amazing my site was jumped from #234 to #9 in few weeks time.
The trick is we must got our website pinned and repinned by many people thisis the hardest part. Most of pinterest users won’t doing repin when they aren’tlike what we pinned.
I do simple thing to outsource it on fiverr and got my site pinned by 75 people, I don’t know how can he did it just search by typing pinterest on fiverr and you willfind it on the TOP. Many other seller offer pinterest service on fiverr but in my experience they can’t make my website increase in SEO. I don’t know why.
As I know currently pinterest is best for SEO for these reason:
1. Once our website pinned it has 3 backlinks counts
2. Google interest in social media signal so it will not tagged as links farm
3. Currently pinterest links are dofollow even the image
4. Even not support anchor text (except the url link), it’s still perfect for placing our keywords in description. Google will READ it!!
5. You need to ping the links of your pins to the to get your website increase in SEO
6. Obama The President and Mark Zuckerberg now pinning on Pinterest lol.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Thanks.

Nice article.

NoFollow links never pass page value then other valuepass is as normal.

free flower bulbs worldwide.

There is no reason for Google to not give weight to no follow links in their algorithm. When you think about it, often the places in which people gain quality links which are really relevant to the user only hand out no follow. That does not mean that the link is not super relevant for the user.

Remember Google was not made for SEO is was made for the user.

Wow.. me and a friend had this talk a few weeks back, where he told me I shouldnt bother about getting no-follow links. Now I can show him this test :)
THX :)

It would be interesting to know if your experiments had a similar result now. I fervently believe that no follow links do add benefit, one of my blogs has half a dozen very low value do follow links and about 200 no follow links and it has PR and Authority that far outweigh the do follow stuff. But it would be nice to know if it went back into the test domain phase if that's true or if I'm just missing something.

awesome post thanks for this

This is some great work.

I've never really considered the possibility Google may still apply factors from link even if it is no-followed. With that said, I'd be interested to see this updated for 2012 to see if this is still the case or whether Google has either tightened it's belt or got more lax as more webmasters have applied the attribute.

I know while reading Google documentation it's almost implied that the no-follow tag is strictly adhered to whilst stopping short of stating it as a fact. This has led me to the conclusion that the tag is not 100% honored, 100%of the time.

I didn't do any exact experiments on this one, but I know that even nofollow backlinks from diverse forums did help me in ranking better at Google.

Very interesting case study indeed.
Actually I allready thought that nofollow links were defenately passing value to my sites. When I do linkbuilding I write all information in an excell sheet so I have a good record of what I did. Usually after a few hours of posting something to a blog, I can see my rankings allready changing. It doesn't seem to matter if it's a nofollow link. So, actually I don't care about follow or nofollow links.
Who cares if you don't get extra pagerank? As long as you move up in the SERPS.
I hope they don't change their mind at Google and decide when they have their next elefant (or whatever) update that suddenly all nofollow links don't matter anymore...
I think the best is, to have a very diverse link pattern from pages which have related content.

So finally we can now believe that nofollow links are valuable that can help in improving ranking of their website on search engine

It'd sure be nice to have an updated version of this blog. I wonder if in the last 2 yrs more people have verified this.

What I gather from this is that while nofollow links do not share Page Rank juice they do in fact help with SERP. I'm willing to say PR is not that valuable to SERP anyway. One of our websites has High PR, enormous amounts of Links, most of them relevant, extremely relevant site with many index pages, and yet rank #2 behind a low PR, low amount of links website. It's driving me crazy for I don't know what else to do!

Wow, this is a bit of a game changer! Very interesting article with good evidence, I can't wait to refer to this article next time I hear someone say "nofollow links are a waste of time"

nofollow will tell the crawler robot not to follow the link on the crawled website but still collect the links or link found.
dofollow will tell the crawler robot to follow the link on the crawled website and crawl to index the link found while continuing crawling and indexing links found on the crawled website.

sample. nofollow >> lambingan.net found a link text movie to "movie" the crawler robot will not go to the lambingantv.com but will account the link and index it then continue processing the links on lambingan.net without going anywhere.

sample. dofollow >> lambingan.net found a link text movie to "movie" the crawler robot will go to the website of lambingantv.com crawl and index it while continuing processing the links on lambingan.net until it finishes and halt the job and waited if frequency is to when to comeback.

No-follow links have a lot of value, and this experiment that you did surely proves the argument on this subject. Having a website with only do-follow links is bad for SEO, because it's not natural and it will definitely set a red alarm on.

After the latest algorithm changes, having a mix of good quality links on relevant websites, naturally proportioned no-follow and do-follow, will be the only way to boost your rankings.

Thanks for the experiment and analysis!

this is a very nice and helpful article. now i can understand about nofollow links

I already had my suspicions about this issue for some time. Your experiment is very useful and it makes a lot of sense. What doesn't make any sense is that a link from a blog with no authority and no relation with your industry can pass PR and those who are relevant to your industry and your topic do not. Eventhough do follow links are much more important as we all know. Overall, I agree so now I have something to work on in my daily SEO task.

Thanks for sharing
Jaime
SEO Asturias

Excellent post. Sometimes I feel google don't even know how their own systems rank pages and sites. I'm new to SEO and this article has reinforced my belief that every link carries some value.

Well, I do care of No-follow links when it comes to high priority websites… i agree with most of the points but too many external no follow links can /might be a red flag?

well, how can you control the external links linking to your website that are linking you naturally? obviously when you write something Awesome people give reference but they might put the no-follow while giving the link (though its not a good practice in my eye) but my point is you can not control the external no-follow links to your website.

the subject that you wrote is very interesting and helpful

We did some experimenting like this ourselves and we had the same result. Even no follow links can cause traffic to your site to they you should not exclude them when doing link building.

Thats realy great post i realy get much more information to this post and very informative.

There are still some of no-follow links google indexed that i have been receiving backlinks from. Even there are some of no-follows link...google indexes it. But One thing is going around me is can we get link juice from no-follow blogs

Nice experiment, thank you for sharing. I find that anything Matt Cutts suggests needs to be tested as quite often reality has nothing to do with what he preaches. I guess this is also part of his job... But part of our job is to test! Well done Brian!

Great experiment, i wonder if the effect is still somewhat similar anno 2013..

That is exactly what i was doubting from last some times. Google pay attention to no-follow links but don't says it.

Found this article when searching for the impact of nofollow links and it's probably one of the best articles out there, thanks to your detailed case study.
I appreciate the time you took to actually test this out.

Now my question is- how will this change (if at all) in 2013? After all, social links from twitter/facebook and video links from YouTube are also not followed, yet they have some impact on rankings.

Peace,
Chris

I know I'm late here but I never believed the "no-follow" tag was 100% effective. Hence I have never ignored websites that applies "no-follow" tags just like this one. Relevancy and quality matters a lot.

However, previously I had some doubts regarding this but now, after reading your blog I'm 100% sure that even "no-follow" links are valued.

Thanks for your time, you have answered one of the most frequently asked questions that we often ask ourselves every time we encounter with "no-follows"

thanks for the great article. wondered if this was still the case post-penguin, post-panda!? .. anyway, great test, and reporting on it!

I think producer chris has hit the nail on the head. Back in 200? the no-follow was a necessary goal-post change from Google's point of view - it took people off the scent for sure. The goal posts are always moving though, so the more time passes and the more and more social sites have no-follow attributes as standard, the more and more Google HAS to count them. They can use the data to their advantage and sharpen up their algorhythms more so than not having no-follow signals are admitting that they now do count, and whichever way they go about it, there's no way as long as I have a hole in my backside that a no-follow link IS or WILL BE worthless. Ask the hundreds of SEO bods on this site making comments if their suspicions haven't been sneaked! Great that you guys took the effort to make this experiment. Hard to say totally without having a third site the same with no links at all to compare natural on-site SEO - but sort of irrelevant - you got your site ranked with on-site SEO and No-follow links - fact!