Nofollow backlinks to rank a website.

The value of nofollow backlinks to rank a website

Recently there always seems to be plenty of discussion in various places around the web about the value search engine wise, of nofollow backlinks. On the blogs of the worldly wise and on forums dealing with internet marketing and ranking, there are questions being asked, notions being discussed and ideas being thrown around, some with evidence to back up statements.

I do not put myself forward as an expert on the subject or an authority figure or guru in any way whatsoever, I just have my own thoughts about the value of these types of backlink.

My own thoughts are that nofollow backlinks are widely undervalued. The search…nay the quest, for dofollow backlinks (or backlinks without the nofollow tag) is never-ending, and becoming increasingly difficult in the case of commenting on blogs.
The main provider of dofollow backlinks are social networks, social bookmarking sites and article directories. These are easily obtained and easily automated for maximum quantity but lowest quality. They are then pages with no pagerank or trust flow or citation flow (although they would be mostly on high PR domains admittedly) for the duration of their lives, unless backlinked by a quality page themselves.

Sure there are a few places to get free high PR dofollow backlinks, but they mostly have thousands of OBL’s already. Sorry, but I’d rather not have them. Neither do I want to buy expensive dofollow backlinks on sites selling them.

Is dofollow really worth all the effort…of course it is! (but I have an alternative plan.)

So why the big fuss over dofollow. Most people seem to argue that dofollow is all that matters because the search engines simply ‘do not follow’ nofollow backlinks.
The thing is, I know that a high PR dofollow page with low OBL’s and a backlink to my site will give my page good PR itself…whoopee-doo!
This does not always guarantee that your search engine rankings will improve dramatically as a result unless you find plenty of them, proof of this is finding a PR6 page on page 4 of the search results which most likely means bad on-page seo.

Now having good PR should imply that you will rank high for your keywords because you have some powerful backlinks in your profile. Being perfectly optimised onpage and having good PR should accomplish that even better of course, but this is where I bring in the nofollow argument.

People generally disregard nofollow and so it is possible (as I have done recently) to find large quantities of High PR nofollow pages with no backlinks on them at all because they have either spam protection or captcha on them which gives them greater value in the eyes of Google etc.These pages need to be lovingly commented on manually.

Here is my cunning plan – to rank a new site on nothing but nofollow.

Now, I have a huge list of PR1 to PR7  pages that are nofollow, virtually zero OBL’s and have to be commented on manually. These pages are immensely powerful and my opinion is that using these I can rank a website well using no other type of backlink. You also have to bear in mind that relevance carries massive weight in backlinking so a PR5 page (which is probably on a PR6 or 7 domain) that relates to your website theme is very powerful. If you leave meaningful comments without spammy looking anchor text (just use your name ) then quite often the comment gets approved. I can show you examples of high PR links to my sites.

Does ‘nofollow’ actually mean ‘nofollow’?

I have plenty of nofollow links in my linking profile that have been indexed, so even though the search engine does not pass on the PageRank, it still knows where the link goes to because otherwise they would not appear in my ranking reports and therefore still, in my opinion, passes credit and serps juice instead, not to mention loads of free organic traffic.

Therefore, the nofollow tag will represent purely a way for a webmaster to avoid leakage of PR to all and sundry.

Anyway, why should I worry about having a decent PR on my site and its pages if they rank well without it?