Bing doesn't use nofollow properly, and now that Yahoo search is bing, Bing rules are the ones you worry about.
well if your aim is to increase your page rank then its useless, but if its to increase your ranking then it definitely does help, my competitor is at one for a highly competitive term with 90% of his backlinks being no follow
I've found they are helpful. I used to skip no follow. Then got lazy and added a bunch one summer. Rankings improved. Just my experience, but now I don't give much thought to it although I definitely hunt follow sites.
I comment on 5k auto approved wp blogs and all of them were nofollow. so what I see they are useless none of them showed in WMT nor help in ranking
No definitive answer is ever going to come up for this question because the test environment is too ambiguous and work-intensive. People would rather spend their time making money than performing giant controlled trials about the effects of nofollow links. Nevertheless, for my part, I feel that if Google took nofollow links into account for rank, their search results would come off worse. Nofollow is for webmasters to mark user-generated content on their domains as "untrustworthy" so why would Google pay any attention? They have a hard job to do and they're not "god". Nofollow links help Google to weed out unworthy votes.
You MUST used, not only because Yahoo, Bing and others will count, but because for Google's also looks "natural". If your site just use Follow links looks suspicious, so use it and wait for the traffic and the PR.
There's active debate about whether nofollow links help to improve serp position, it's ok to speculate about this. However, one thing is certain - nobody needs to have nofollow links to try and look natural. So many websites will have only standard backlinks and no nofollow backlinks. Do they get penalized by this magic "natural" filter? Proportion of nofollow to d0follow links can reliably tell Google nothing. The variables are too..well, variable. There is one way that Google might seek out spammers, however - having only nofollow links without any "verified votes" coming from editorially approved d0fllow links.
Agreed with Micallef, I think the whole 'You must have nofollow to look natural' attitude is BS and a waste of time. The only reason we think this is because a lot of us are blackhatting our link building. Think about all the legit webmasters out there who have paid for their links and do legit link exchanges. None of those are likely to be nofollow and I'm certain they won't be penalized because of it.
I have done some small scale tests and a blog that has 50 no follow backlinks generally doesn't get any higher in the serps that a blog with no backlinks at all.
As saady said, if the is is authority it will help your site. Is a link from nofollow Wikipedia useless, duh!!! [edit] M. Cutts ONLY said no pagerank is passed, he said nothing about: a) trustrank (e.g. a link from wikipedia) b) relevancy
I agree but limited to ultra-authority sites (there are not many of these), I'd be pleased to get a nofollow from wikipedia because tere is a decent chance that it will help somehow. However, this is not a proven effect either.
i think people need to just forget that PR exists. it's a fairly worthless metric that goog and the rest of the red herring "se gurus" run around touting with too much importance. seriously. forget it exists. an inbound link is a vote for your site, nofollow, high pr, low pr, do follow, etc. they all matter. they matter more when anchored and followed of course, but yes, all links matter and are counted and in the end, help your property.
