[bserge]

Last time I was into SEO, the big "experts" seemed to agree that even nofollow links are useful for ranking. Now I'm not sure if it was just more bullshit (the industry is full of it), although it makes sense that with how widespread nofollow is these days, Google might have no choice but to take them into account. Otherwise they'd have to ignore like half the Web.

[rchaud]

That's correct. If Google treated every Twitter/FB/Reddit link as useless just because those sites attach 'nofollow' to every external link, it would have a much worse idea of what links are relevant and what's not.

Nofollow is still useful for site owners that are using it as intended, and not as a site-wide policy. It's just that most sites do not get a fraction of the traffic a big tweet or Reddit post would get.