Yes. And here is why you should not discount no follow links.

Rand Fishkin,  Founder of SEOmoz just did a great blog on early ranking factors data after his companies April Linkscape update.

One of his interesting points during the session was that many SEO’s are using more no follow links, and that they are seeing better value in them.

I have agreed with that for years. And here is why. A link profile that has a nice mix of Follow and no Follow is more natural.  Google likes natural.

Not only that,  but as Rand made this point in the presentation, alot of really trusted sites and high value sites use no follow. Face book, twitter, wordpress… the list goes on and on. I don’t think google really pays as much attention to the no follow tag as many people think they do. Why would they. Works to their advantage if we think they do, as they then have a metric that is pretty easy to identify sites building an unnatural linking profile using an unnatural amount or percentage of follow links.

So, I go back to were I always seem to go with Links. Add links that you would add without considering how they will effect your site rankings, and you will end up in good shape. SEO is not search engine manipulation. It is solid marketing and promotion for your web site.

You can see the blog here