aristotle - 6:35 pm on Jun 13, 2009 (gmt 0)

I have a website that has gradually acquired more than 100 natural links from various forums and social bookmarking sites. The site got these links because its purpose is to promote a particular social cause, and people sometimes cite one of its pages to support their own arguments for the same cause.

The problem for me is that nearly all of these links have a nofollow tag. Thus, even though they are "natural" links created by other people without my involvement, Google doesn't give the site any credit for them.

So in this case it appears to me that Google has negated the effect of its own original idea of using naturally-acquired links as a measure of the quality of a site's content. In fact, considering the web as a whole, I would guess that Google is disregarding millions of naturally acquired links because they have a nofollow tag.