Matt has talked a lot about how Google treats the Nofollow attribute. To be specific, they do follow and crawl no-follow links, but they do not pass PageRank or Anchortext value from those links.
No one here as posted anything that suggests they were able to isolate the influence of natural backlinks from artificially placed nofollow backlinks. How can you conclude that the backlinks with nofollow attributes had any influence on your ranking in the SERP?
Personally, I have found that promoting websites by posting relevant and useful comments on high traffic blogs can be effective in attracting targeted direct link traffic, completely independent from search engine traffic. This type of promotion is not affected by the Nofollow attribute.
Also, I have discovered that this promotion tactic, when done well, can be a very effective method of attracting natural backlinks which have a great deal of influence on SERP rankings. While my nofollow backlinks had no direct influence on SERP rankings, they did play a role in acquiring natural backlinks, which had a direct influence on SERP rankings.
Here’s how to follow links on blog comments lead to SERP rankings:
- Is Google now following NOFOLLOW links now and then?Useful Nofollow Comment Links + Relevant High Traffic Blogs = Targeted Traffic ->
- Targeted traffic + Useful Content = Natural Backlinks ->
- Natural Backlinks + Optimized Content = SERP Ranking
