: Ratio of No-follow & Do-follow Backlinks I know that when it comes to obtaining backlinks, a no-follow is pretty much worthless. However, does Google (or other major search engines) penalize for

@Correia994

No links are worthless. All have some value. True a link from a blog comment of something unrelated is of very little value but it does carry some. Forum posts have very little also. But 10,000 + to a website in a market where links are extremely hard (like ball bearings) does help. It all depends on the industry, competition, country, trust and other factors.

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@Sarah324

SEO myths get dumber and dumber with time...

The ratio of nofollow and dofollow links is definitely not a factor because:


It is an indication of nothing. Really, how does this ratio indicate anything about the page quality? Or page's relevance? It doesn't.
"Appearing organic" is such a stupid term. Organic is organic. Everything else is not. Search engines are good at, and getting better at, detecting manipulation schemes. Any time you try to appear as something you're not you're manipulating them and that's just dumb (and asking for trouble either now or in the future).
Nofollow links are designed to help reduce spam and paid link manipulation. If a site doesn't have any nofollow links then they're not spamming or buying links. Should they be penalized for that?
Links from external sites are (theoretically) out of a webmaster's control. So you can't negatively judge a web page (or site) by the actions or links on another site since they don't control it. (If they are caught participating in some kind of scheme then obviously we're into manipulation and it's a different situation then being discussed here).
Building on the above, links on other sites can never hurt you (unless you part of a link scheme, buying links, etc). Otherwise it would be too easy for competitors to hurt you. The worst thing that can happen is links from suspect pages are devalued or ignored.

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