Google still doesn’t give any credit towards nofollow links. Even, if you get a link from PR 10 page or site that is nofollow, you won’t get a single benefit in Google SERP ranking or SEO point of view in google search engine. Getting a relevant link from related pages or content with nofollow will not help you to increase ranking in search results of Google. It is clear that nofollow attribute will not helpful to increase search ranking in Google. Matt has clearly declared this point in below video. Nofollow links are meant to target real users instead of search engine. So, if your SEO guy gets you nofollow links and claims that it will help you in Google search ranking, I suggest you show them this video instead.
Question: Are nofollow links worth getting? Or are they almost irrelevant?
Answer: Lets step into right mindset here. Nofollow links are dropped out of google’s link rep. So, they are irrelevant from search engine point of view, but guess what; search engine are not the entire limit of the world. There are also users. So, nofollow links can absolutely be worth getting if you intend to get users with those links. So, if someone shows up in my blog and there is really insight for comment, often time they’ll click-through to find out more about them. And then, a lot of other readers do that as well. So, even if you just participate in a forum where nofollows in member’s profile link or something like that. If you are saying useful stuff, you can still drive visitors to click on those links and visit your site. So, don’t get so focused, don’t get blind yourself thinking only of search when you can drive traffic in a lot of different ways. There was a site that I was talking about recently, which says that they get more traffic from Twitter than Google. So, driving those users don’t have to happen through search more like an entire spectrum of stuff. So, nofollowed links can absolutely be worth getting in terms of visitors. And, if you just spam a bunch of blogs, no one ever looked at those links and is nofollowed. Those are not going to be very useful to you. But, don’t forget to think about the users in addition of search.
I’m not convinced that no-follow links have no SERP value. I will conduct an experiment: i want to get only no-follow links for a new domain and see if i get some results.
I’ll let you know the conclusion