Are “NoFollow” Links A Waste of Time?

People all over are concerned about wasting their time with “nofollow” links and that it does nothing to support their search engine optimization and marketing efforts. I guess it’s a good time as any to dig deeper and explain what is going on here and why you shouldn’t just ignore “nofollow” links.

First off, here’s a video from Matt Cutts, a SPAM engineer from Google, giving some insights about backlinks from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook:

I’ve always agreed that it doesn’t matter if your backlink is from a .org, .net, .com, .gov or .edu. The domain extension doesn’t make it any more (or less) important than any other.

I’ve also mentioned in the past that any backlink with “nofollow” in it does not pass on any PR (page rank) value. No argument there.

However, don’t just ignore backlinks from “nofollow” sites. I’ve performed a test to prove my theory.

1. Registered brand new domain.
2. Created a website with DUPLICATE content.
3. Commented on 8 “nofollow” blogs a day for 3 days.
4. Did NOTHING else… including submitting to search engine, article marketing, anything. JUST the blog commenting.

3 days later, the website was indexed. I stopped posting blog comments and had received a total of 20 visitors.

If such a simple task still carries over some traffic, what makes you think getting backlinks from “nofollow” is a waste of time? Of course, it would be more beneficial to get the ‘do follow’ backlinks. Just try to be as natural as possible and not be too concerned whether a site is a do or not follow.