I have accumulated many years of test data and so have many others. While I understand that Cutts must represent Google’s interests, it’s not in Google’s interest to lose credibility in their spokesman. Naturally, Matt leaves out information that may encourage artificial manipulation or other dubious activity, generally, I find what he says to be quite credible. If he were to make statements that where flat out false there would be a wave of outrage coming from industry insiders along with data that proves the lies. I don’t find innuendo as a credible opposition. If you know of verifiable lies told by Cutts let’s see it!
The Nofollow debate is an invalid argument in my opinion. The reason Nofollow links are effective to have nothing to do with how Google treats them. You see, any promotional effort can have a positive benefit. Some of the highest-ranking websites in highly competitive markets have earned their rankings through offline advertising. Anything that drives massive amounts of targeted traffic to a website with useful content will benefit indirectly in search engine rankings. Naturally, that includes nofollow backlinks that have absolutely no link juice.
That indirect benefit is not unlike the one you see from Pay-Per-Click advertising. Google claims they don’t boost organic rankings from PPC customers, yet most advertisers realize a significant boost in organic rankings. This happens, not because Google is favoring their PPC customers, those advertisers are benefiting from the increased awareness created by their ad campaigns that indirectly influence organic rankings. The same indirect benefit that PPC advertising causes on organic rankings happens for nofollow backlinks.
