Every blogger and technologist should know that a certain, special HTML attribute prevents links from being counted by Google: rel="nofollow"
For example:
<a href=”http://www.freemacware.com”>This links boosts freemacware’s ranking</a>
<a href=”http://www.freemacware.com” rel=”nofollow”>This links does not boost freemacware’s ranking</a>
Google considers the second link a “non-endorsement” so it doesn’t give the page credit when calculating Pagerank.
Possible uses for nofollow:
- Link to a competitor without boosting their ranking
- Give weight to the most important links on your page and use “nofollow” on all the rest so as not to dilute the important ones
- Discourage spam on blog comments (most blogging software automatically adds this attribute to links in comments to discourage spamming for SEO reasons)
Cautions with nofollow:
- If you buy, swap, or sell links, make sure no one cheats you by adding this attribute to their links
- If you leave comments on blogs, know that links back to your site probably won’t help your SEO since most blog comments are wrapped with this attribute.
Source: Google Information for Webmasters (#14)
Enter link building and social relevency. SEO is on its way out (several years, granted, but out).
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So I would doubt if nofollow has really any sense.
In my opinion the nofollow thing will be dead soon…