Backlinks in the new world of social sites that use "nofollow"

[koan]

I have a site that is popular among a certain demographics and I mostly get my natural external links from social sites such as stumbleupon, yahoo answers, wikipedia, forums, etc. It seems that these sites have replaced the small sites from your average joe, like geocities some years ago. However, all these sites use the nofollow attributes on links nowadays! They do bring a certain amount of traffic on their own, but isn't Google missing on a lot of that action by not taking this new web 2.0 dynamic into consideration? I know they're possibly easy to spam, but still, there must be some value to this data. Meanwhile, it's becoming a handicap for my site where the popularity of word of mouth does not have a corresponding improvement in the SERPS.

[ChicagoFan67]

This may explain why I dropped from PR4 to PR2. A lot of my incoming links are from the places you mention.

I've also got a feeling that Google has devalued links from Livejournal in recent months.

[vincevincevince]

nofollow within comments is now the industry standard, and that's with good reason; however, it is generally rare to find nofollow within the post proper.

So: If you want your links to be counted, put them in the post proper rather than in the comments.

Corollary: If your links aren't in the post proper then it means the blogger didn't feel your site was worth a mention. And if the blogger didn't feel your site was worth a mention, then your site probably isn't worth a mention. And if your site probably isn't worth a mention, then all your SEO attempts are, quite frankly, a losing battle to get users to a site which isn't even worth a mention from where they will promptly leave and go elsewhere.

Conclusion: Make a site of great interest and value and all the other things you crave will become much easier (apart from your sleep craving). Use comments to communicate with other bloggers and the wider community, aim for them to see your site and be moved to write a post about it.

[meditation]

It is indeed getting more difficult to promote your blog/site with the many recent changes in the field, "nofollow" being just one of them. In addition to the above comments, one decent way that I see still open is writing and publishing articles.

[Bewenched]

With all the "no follow" tags being used these days you'd think it would be nearly impossible for sites to get rankings. My guess is that google will be looking more at the volume of traffic a site gets. Especially if they use analytics.

[olias]

My guess is that google will be looking more at the volume of traffic a site gets

Given how hard they are pushing the Toolbar out with various bit of software I'm guessing they must have a big enough user base to start drawing on that information now.

It is frustrating having lots of links from the likes of StumbleUpon though that are all NOFOLLOW - I am not complaining about the steady stream of traffic they deliver, but I am lucky to be in a sector where that traffic is useful to me.

Getting mentions in blog posts is definitely what one needs to aim for in making the most of the social web for SEO purposes, sometimes you just need to be as blatent as to tell people that they want to blog about you!

[BradleyT]

These companies build social sites which grow exponentially from user contributed content and then slap nofollow attributes on the links - talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

[glengara]

Just to further muddy the waters someone published a script that hides the no-follow to the viewer but not to the SE :-(