I participate in different online forums and I see so many people asking the same kind of questions over and over again.
One of these questions is whether backlinks with nofollow tags help a site’s ranking or not?
In other words: If a Site A gets a link from another Site B and if this link has a nofollow tag: then will this link help Site A in anyway?
Like a [small or big] boost in search engine ranking? Or a boost in PR?
The simple answer that I post to this question is that: links that have nofollow tag are not counted as backlinks.
At least Google do not count these as backlinks and as what I have heard: Yahoo and MSN also do not give any credit in terms of search results ranking to links with nofollow tag.
The name of the tag says it all: Nofollow: makes the links being not followed.
In simple words, search engine bots do not follow the links and thus it gives no credit to the nofollowed linked site.
Some people do say that SE bots follow the links with nofollow tag but no credit of any kind is given. I am not sure about it and I personally think that SE bots do not even follow/crawl the nofollowed links.
Anyway: if you wish to get any PR juice from a link or you want to get any SEO benefits of any kind from the links, then they need to be not nofollowed.
I saw in many places like: Google Webmaster Tools Blog and Help Forum/Group and in other places where Google clearly mentioned that Google do not give any credit to the site that have a link with nofollow tag.
Google stated in many places that this nofollow tag was introduced to help fight against Spam and also to tackle the Paid Links problem.
There is a video that Matt Cutts posted in the Matt’s Grab Bag section at Google Webmaster Tools Videos Channel in YouTube.
Matt answered two questions both of which were related to nofollow tags: Matt clearly said that if a link is nofollowed, then no matter from which site it is coming, there will be no boost in ranking.
