I'm all for testing things, but this test is not going to conclusively prove anything.

Did you look at the sites on page one for that keyword?

You could probably rank somewhere on the first page with almost nothing but on-page factors.

I would suggest choosing something at least a little more competitive, so that if the site does rank, doubters aren't throwing the lack of competition in your face.

Something with more competition will give more conclusive evidence that NoFollow links can boost rankings.

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A better way would be to use nofollow links with a nonsense word for anchor text linking to the page. If it never ranks for that nonsense word with no competition then we know there is no effect from the links.

I already did this test. Competitive keyword - 60k searches - Used Only No Follow but relevant blog comment links to rank it to #11. I've since starting using all kinds of links to get it to #1.

But the bottom line is:

-nofollow links DO pass serp value
-nofollow links DO get followed by Google

I'm also supporting the fact that No-follow work but I'm also convinced that they don't work well alone, neither do do-follow links.

It is still is about Link Diversity and Link Velocity. Everything is connected. No-follow links as said earlier are most likely to be "social", that means that website is being discussed, therefore a popular topic. If the website is being discussed more, it is most probably good topic, therefore more people should see it.

It should make perfect sense if you think about bloggers and news websites.

1. I agree with @ BenJackson select some nonsense very low competitive phrase.
2. This phrase must be Neither in title nor in body.

Your page will rank nowhere for this very low competitive keyword even you build 1 million nofollow links. Neither in google nor in bing.

Nofollow links do work! And they work very well. Many of the big bookmarking sites are nofollow and you can get good rankings for a low competitive keyword from bookmarking alone!

Update: Despite all of the optimism...it ain't lookin' to good guys. It's been two weeks no and...

...the keyword "The Nofollow Link Page" in quotes should be bringing it up in search results...but it ain't...uh ohhhhhh...

I'm kicking it up a notch...maybe it's just a degree thing...

Try to ping your links with pingler and massping..

Even if you have no follow links from High pr pages which have low outbound links, trust me you will reap rich benefits..

I always look for High quality pages with Low outbound links regardless of Do follow or no follow..
Besides , try to take your alexa a little bit down.. Trust me it will work..

From what I understand, the only difference between follow and nofollow links is that the nofollow ones don't pass on any page rank.

Oh boy! This topic has been talked about in almost every SEO-related interview I've ever listened to. Just today I watched this video of Matt Cutts saying nofollow links don't boost rankings: Two questions about nofollow - YouTube

Anyway, whether it's a rumour Google spread in order to decrease spam, or it's true - I don't know. Hmm... let's see, what does Google want? Quality results that get backlinks naturally and in an unbiased manner. If you have ten thousand dofollow links and 0 nofollow links, what does that tell Google? It tells Google *you* are building dofollow links. Google knows this way you find dofollow links and put your link there to boost rankings. That's certainly not what Google wants.

Google wanted to reduce spam, and spreading rumours (if it is a rumour, that is) of nofollow has reduced it SIGNIFICANTLY. If Wikipedia, for example, was dofollow, literally EVERY single day hundreds (or more) internet marketers would attempt to put their link somewhere, as they are publicly editable. Job of the Wikipedia editors would've been so difficult. (Sure, many many still do, but just saying "links from wikipedia are nofollow" keeps MANY from trying to spam). And I'm just taking an example, by the way. If Google started the myth with an intent to improve the web with this little white lie, then they've succeeded.

But some things make me think Google may be serious about it - they don't want paid links and they suggest paid links for direct advertising should be nofollow'ed, else it's against Google TOS. When you look at it this way, Google sees nofollow tag as a boon, so it may be not be a myth. We can't know for sure.

You know what, I'll just do a case study to find out myself as well. I'll start building nofollow links to one of my Squidoo pages that's been ranking 7th or something from a month, so I'll use that for testing. Will report the results here as soon as I see any.

@OP, how many nofollow links did you build? It might take some time for Google to index them especially if the blogs you've commented on for links are low quality. Try going for high quality blogs and ping them when they're approved. Or I guess you can try nofollow article directories (like knol, for example) for testing, too.

Anish.

OK, let me see if I get this straight:

You tried to rank a web page with no-follow links only, and it did?

What's the point of using no-follow then?

Can't wait to see the results. From my experiences, I could care less if a link is NoFollow or DoFollow unless of course we're talking about a high PR contextual link.

The main thing people need to understand is that NoFollow backlinks are natural in a normal backlink portfolio. Even the best of sites get NoFollow links, because of the way CMS/Forums/etc automatically add the nofollow attribute. Thus, if you have a 100% DoFollow backlink profile for a website, it looks completely unnatural.

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I have analyzed the nofollow links and I do believe that they help alot but with the spice of dofollow links. Nofollow links actually plays a vital role in the ranking but they don't pass the link juice so that means you can not increase your PR (who needs it?). When you also made some dofollow links the site appears to be more authentic in the eyes of Google and they rank it high

LOL!!! It's official. Nofollow links are completely worthless (at least without the keywords ON the page - phase 2). I will try some onsite SEO to see if the combo has ANY EFFECT AT ALL.