Great Editorial link but nofollow :(

[Rlilly]

I love getting those emails with pingbacks especially from well known sites. But then you check the source and see nofollow. A great editorial link by a well known author is a nofollow. The pendulum and moved to far in one direction. Google needs to to stop the scare tactics about links and give sites a chance to succeed.

[brotherhood of LAN]

It seems like you've acquired a good link that might get click throughs, it's a shame you thought about Google first :(

[EditorialGuy]

I doubt if large, legitimate editorial sites are shaking in their shoes because of Google's alleged "scare tactics." The real problem is the corporate mentality. Even before rel="nofollow" was introduced, some large publishers had disclaimers about links on their sites. (I still see those now and then: I'll click on a link and get an interstitial warning box that says something like "You're about to leave XYZ.com and go to a third-party site.")

It's the same mentality that leads companies to say that you can't link to their Web sites without their permission. (How dumb is that?)

P.S.: At least you got a link. A lot of "big media" sites don't do much outside linking these days--they prefer to keep readers trapped within their sites.

[Mentat]

The problem is that now all the sites have nofollow on their links!
Forums, comments, content etc

I believe that Google will have a big problem with this paranoia :(

[martinibuster]

...all the sites have nofollow on their links!

Not true. It's a fraction of a percent that use it on links.

People ask how they can get natural links. Getting a link from an authority site, REGARDLESS if it's a hyperlink or do-follow, is tactic #1 for obtaining natural links.

The real problem is that you were handed gold and don't know what to do with it.

[n0tSEO]

A nofollow link is better than no link at all, as that's how users (and potential customers, if that applies) find your site. They don't check out the source code to see whether a link is nofollow or dofollow; they just click.

[EditorialGuy]

The value of a link in delivering traffic (as opposed to delivering PageRank) depends on the perishability of the page that it's on.

Still, even pages that one might think of as being perishable (such as articles on news sites) can have more staying power than one might guess. Our English-language site still gets traffic from a link in a story in Die Zeit, the German newspaper, that was published months ago. I can't remember offhand if Die Zeit nofollows its links, but even if it does, that link from that "evergreen" newspaper article is sending traffic our way.

[piatkow]

Still, even pages that one might think of as being perishable (such as articles on news sites) can have more staying power than one might guess.

My site was mentioned in a newspaper article in summer 2012. The number of clicks is tailing off but it is still our second most important inbound link.

[aristotle]

It's a fraction of a percent that use it on links.

I see that statement occasionally, but nobody ever provides a reference. It's possible that it might have been true 10 years ago, but there's no way anyone will convince me that it's true now. The vast majority of links from forums and blog comments are nofollow. Not to mention sites like facebook, amazon, wikipedia, and many others put nofollow tags on all external links. My estimate would be that at least 80% of all new external links are nofollow.