I have a good friend that uses almost no follow links and ranks for some crazy keywords. While most people are convinced no follow passes no link juice, closer look at his site proves otherwise.
95% of his backlinks are no-follow. He comments on high PR sites, including newspapers with just regular name anchors.
What I also noticed is that all his no-follow backlinks are niche specific, and the article content is related to his niche.
I am now conducting my own independent test, but please do not expect posting of the results.
You can either keep believing the lies that no follow offers no ranking value, or just conduct your own personal test.
Since our "BIG UNCLE SEARCH ENGINE" started hiding ranking data, mysterious things are happening in the ranking world.
Backlink volume is out, but I have also noticed more value placed on weird backlinks most people would care not to get or look for.
Just other observations:
Web 2.0 died a natural death. You can still use them, just like millions of other websites around the world. It has reached saturation point, if you know what I mean.
Anchor test don't carry much weight nowadays, just naked urls. Raw url will not get you that dreaded site audit notice.
Comments are back in a big way, if carefully done on niche specific websites. Use your imagination, you can twist it to get more value.
Editorial links are still effective, but expect massive crackdown since it is now openly sold at "BLACKHATWORLD" like crack cocaine. Some of the newspapers lost ranking from the last time I checked. Only buy from reputable sellers, like one of the original creators on this forum "daseoman". When newspapers catch on to the trend from Google actions, they will just eliminate the writers accounts along with most of the articles, and you can kiss your backlinks bye-bye.
Blog Networks are still effective, just make sure you know what you're doing as your competitor will call the ranking police on you. Niche specific blog networks are more effective in my opinion. As far as using publicly sold blog networks, let your common sense be your guide.
When you get too many social signals all at once, it will do your site no long term good. You want to get social signals just like a rat nibbles good food. Getting 200 facebook likes in a day or two, with nothing afterwards delivers no value in my opinion. I know big sites can get massive social signals with one post, but they have other metrics to help make it look legit. I sense Google can now spot fake social promotions, but I would rather not reveal the tell-tale signs in a public forum.
Submitting your backlinks to indexing sites will kill your rankings sooner rather than later. Why let Google know that you just cheated and created a bunch of links? The Algorithms are now able to follow and calculate massive link footprints, and using indexing stuff just makes it easier.
