The Nofollow Links at articlebase Issue - How do they help for SEO?

My main post of the day at Internet Marketing Forums. Respond to Community Product Manager at ArticlesBase.

Hi Talia and thanks for posting here.

As Ron already said, the entire articlebase team has earned a great deal of respect for just following this discussion. At least it shows that you are effectively using Google alerts, or what ever alerts system that you maybe using.

I do agree with you on this point: Any backlink counts. Be it nofollow or dofollow link, it can help in one way or the other to drive traffic and promote a website. But from the view point of SEO, all nofollow links are pretty much useless. I mean if we stand by what the main search engines like Google and yahoo are making us to understand.

You mentioned something like search engines following nofllow links as being some kind of usefulness of the link! what good dose it do to my site if some search engine follows my link but cant give a positive vote or maybe index it because it is a nofollow link?

I think, and most webmasters will agree with me that the main reason for submitting to article directories is to provide quality backlinks to your website, that will not only provide instant traffic, but may most importantly also count as positive votes in the eyes of search engines.

Most article directories understood this and I guess that is why most if not all advertise with the following line:
"Submitting articles has become one of the most popular means of generating quality backlinks and targeted traffic to your website. Join us today - It's Free!"

If you doubt it, do a survey and find out the main reason why webmaster write and submit articles. You maybe surprised to notice that more than 51% will mention backlinks before traffic. Most webmasters care for long-term traffic, not short term. And backlinks that count as positive votes provides just that.

You mentioned some doubts if nofollow links don’t count for SEO. It is quite true that no one knows the Google algorithm and what may count for ranking websites. After all we did not participate in writing their crawling algorithm. All the same why on earth will you believe Google when they says backlinks will count as a deciding factor for ranking pages, then for some reason have doubts when the same Google says that some backlinks such as nofollow links wont count?