Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors for SEO success. Quality backlinks are hard to obtain but this is not the hardest part of link building. The hardest part is that often a webmaster gets a backlink (very often in exchange for an outbound link) but this backlink is useless for SEO because it has the nofollow attribute.
What's the Problem with Nofollow Links?
When a couple of years ago Google announced that backlinks to a site weigh a lot, the result was a hysteria of comment spamming on blogs. Posting comments on a relevant blog was the easiest way to get a backlink and that is why every SEO expert rushed to post as many comments as he or she could. For blog owners this wasn't exactly what they needed since when a blog has tons of outbound links, this is bad for its own rankings with search engines.
Many blog owners just deleted the spam comments. However, since not all comments could be classified as spam, this posed a problem. It is then when Google introduced the now famous 'nofollow' attribute, which meant that a link is a link (i.e. it looks like one and it leads to the target page) but it is not a backlink (i.e. when a search engine spider hits the link, this link is not followed and not taken into account).
The nofollow approach solved the problem with comment spam on blogs but since its use couldn't be restricted to blogs only, many webmasters started to use the 'nofollow' attribute for most of their links. This way it became very difficult to find sites within a particular niche and get a real backlink (i.e. a dofollow link or a link without the nofollow attribute) for free.
As the basic economic logic of demand and supply goes, when a resource is not freely abundant, black market fills the gap. Black hat marketers soon found how to get the backlinks they needed – pay for them. This is certainly not what Google had in mind when they introduced the 'nofollow' attribute but since the stakes are high, many SEO experts just pay for the backlinks they need and hope that Google won't punish them for the wrongdoing.
So, Nofollow Links Are Useless, Right?
The fact that nofollow links are not taken into account by Google doesn't mean that nofollow links are useless. Yes, they are useless for achieving high rankings with Google but there are many other ways in which these links are worth.
For instance, unlike Google, some of the other search engines do not pay attention to the 'nofollow' attribute and treat the link as a normal backlink. So, for the other search engines a link is a link. This means that when a webmaster optimizes a site for the other search engines, this link counts. Google might have the lion's share on the search market but still there are other search engines besides it and ranking well with them is not pointless.
In addition to ranking well with some of the search engines, nofollow links are good for getting traffic to one's site. If the nofollow link is from a site with high traffic, this could send thousands and millions of visitors. This traffic might not be from Google but still it is traffic and it is not impossible that the traffic a site gets from a nofollow link, for instance on a popular social bookmarking site, to exceed the traffic from Google.
Is a nofollow link is useless? Certainly not – this link still drives traffic, no matter that the traffic comes directly from the site, not via Google. Therefore, nofollow links might not be backlinks but since they still drive traffic, a webmaster shouldn't neglect them.
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