Editor’s Note:  NoFollow is an attribute that can be placed on a link in the code to indicate that the site linked shouldn’t be given credit for the link, like it normally would if there was no attribute placed on the link in the code.

There is a never-ending debate on whether you should use NoFollow links for your link building campaigns. Some consider them useless and advise you should drop them altogether, while others use the “a link is still a link” principle and pay no attention to the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Here are the top reasons why you should not care about your links being DoFollow:

• Search engines expect to see a mix of DoFollow and NoFollow links pointing to your site. Having solely, let’s say, 10,000 DoFollow’s could raise a set of warning flags. Moreover, if a lot of your links come from questionable sites and/or look spammy, you could even be de-indexed and have all your SEO efforts rendered useless.
• As to this date, only Google is known to make a difference between DoFollow and NoFollow links. While it is true that Google owns a huge share of the search engine market, you could still use NoFollow links to rank nicely in Yahoo! or Bing.
• NoFollow links are easier to get. The inbound links you can get with traditional methods (article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions or social bookmarking) are mostly NoFollow. Focusing on quantity over quality could yield better results for the same efforts.
• A valuable contribution to any Web 2.0 site is worth more than just a link, be it DoFollow or NoFollow. Insightful comments on popular blogs might bring you consistent amounts of traffic, together with branding and recognition. If your site provides quality content, your visitors will link to you.

Rather than worrying about DoFollow versus NoFollow incoming links, here is what you should be focusing on:

• Link relevancy. Always post your links on relevant sites or pages. If you operate a baseball collectibles site, a link on, let’s say, a computer gadgets page won’t weigh as much as one coming from a sports community.
• Quality and authority. Links from well established sites weigh more than ones from new blogs, be them DoFollow or not. Imagine getting a front page link from CNN versus having your blog mentioned on some random tween’s MySpace profile.
• One way vs. reciprocal links. Search engines can catch up with “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” linking schemes. Reciprocal links are considered biased and don’t hold much weight.
• Traffic. A lot of link builders forget about this altogether. Best links you can build are ones that get you genuine traffic and not solely link juice. If you’d get on the front page on Digg and get more than 10,000 hits in one day, you wouldn’t worry about the link being NoFollow, would you?

All in all, use common sense when doing your link building campaigns. Don’t have DoFollow as your primary goal—if you can place your link on a quality site, do it.