Value of Nofollow Links

I've read a couple of articles that say their is some seo value to nofollow links.
Here is one from Miche*lle Mac*phearson:
Can anybody confirm or deny this?

Yes, I can confirm this because I was a heavy SEO guy. The ONLY benefit of nofollow links is for high rankings in msn and other smaller search engines.

Sometimes what Google considers nofollow IS a follow for Yahoo and MSN.

The more links that you have regardless of what type of follow it is, then the better you are off.

In the end, the only thing ranking your competitor higher than you in the rankings is the quality and quantity of links (excluding onpage optimizations).

I can confirm that google discards the NoFollow tag, 1 month ago, I had only 1 backlink with a nofollow tag in the blog containing my link, appeared in the search engine in 48 hours, and within a month, it showed as a valid backlink!


Wizzy

1. Nofollow links with well chosen anchor text can pass link juice
2. Blog commenting on nofollow blogs is still an effective way to increase search engine rank for a term

And "nofollow links *do* still contribute value to a site?s rank in all three major search engines"

I also like to mix things up with no follow links for two reasons:

1) If you're commenting on a popular blog or forum, you'll get traffic if you post on topics that are hot - people will scroll through all the comments and posts and check out your site, and those people will be very interested in your subject matter and highly targeted and

2) You still want to look "natural" to Google. If everything regarding your site appears overly optimized and not organic, Google will know this. Think of it this way. If I bring out a site about Britney Spears latest breast implants, in the "real" world of organic linking I'd be getting links from all kinds of sites - not necessarily just celeb sites. This is how news or hot topics spread in reality - they cross boundaries, and sites link in to your site using all different keywords and anchor text. And you'll get links from everything from pet lovers sites to gossip sites to gadget geek sites.

When we overly optimize or try to control a site so that the ONLY links coming in are from carefully selected places where the niche exactly matches our keyword - that's not natural. Google likes things to be organic or else it raises a red flag.

So it's good to comment on some forums that are highly related to your niche and keywords - plus it's just as good to comment on irrelevant forums or forums that cover more generic topics. Same thing for blogs.

While certainly you need SOME of your backlinks to be from highly relevant sites, don't go to extremes. A "social vote" for your site coming from a blog or forum unrelated to your keyword still carries great power in the overall SEO snapshot that Google takes for your site.

Dan

THEY DO!

the only optimizing i do is blog commenting, and the majority of sites i post to are no follow, and i get top serps!

I had heard that Yahoo and MSN don't care about nofollow properties on links and they are still counted. You guys pretty much verified it. I could care less as a link on a site can bring me visitors with or without nofollow tags.

never ever depends on only one resource. follow or no-follow, the more links, the better as long as the money you earned from it is more than what you into it.

I've been going after only ******** links but after reading the article and the comments here I'm definitely going to start commenting on a few few nofollow blogs.
Thanks for the input.