In college I worked for a conservative magazine called The Brown Spectator. While it was only a college magazine, I had a ton of fun working on it to practice SEO. My proudest moment was the day I discovered I was ranking number 1 for “Mitt Romney” in Google images—although it didn't last long because I screwed with it.

Because it was my experimental stomping grounds, the site is a bit of an SEO disaster (I say that so I don't get lectured when all of you start combing through the source), but I learned a lot as a result of working on the site. One of the funnest things I got to do was monitor traffic on the Spectator. Just a few days ago, as I was watching real time results in Woopra, I noticed a huge uptick in traffic to a post that gets almost no traffic entitled “The End of Dissent.” Why was it getting so much attention? The article, which was previously buried (having only 121 unique pageviews since it was posted months and months ago) got a nofollow link on a comment from a Pajama's Media Article. Over the next two days, the article nearly doubled it's total unique views.

After a few hours, I noticed that more links were pouring in to the same article from a different site. Sure enough, as a result of getting the nofollow link in an article that was highly targeted, the article was written about in a forum and given a dofollow link. After about a week, someone found the article again searching in Google. As a direct result of the one organic link the article received, the article itself, found its way to the top of the SERPS for some obscure set of keywords that very few people would actually use. It was blogged about on a site with some real authority. So, to make a long story short, a dofollow link directly resulted in two great organically generated links.

In the end, from my short-lived, but informative linkbuilding experiences, I've found that the most important bit of organic linkbuilding (especially for those sites that aren't regularly updating or don't have the resources or the ability to put viral content together) is getting relevant viewers to see relevant content. The reason the Pajama's Media link was so awesome was the way in which both articles related to one another; the Spectator's article informed the discussion surrounding the other article. I know I'm kind of preaching to the choir here, but we all know the importance of relevant viewers seeing our content. It's what keeps bounce rates low, and it's also what makes users come back. Needless to say, I'm sold on nofollows. That goes for building links on relevant articles like Wikipedia and even Twitter. My goal is to get interested eyeballs to interesting pages—nothing more nothing less.

I know that mine wasn't a great sample size, but to put it into context, of the people that came to the article as a direct or indirect result of the nofollow, ~1% made a comment on the article itself, and ~2% blogged about it (although I don't think that my data is universalizable)—actually, if you count this article, then the results were blogged about by 3% of the visitors. While I don't think that these numbers would hold on a site with more viewers, I think that they represent the way in which content ends up going viral. In the end, ALL IT TAKES IS ONE LINK, and it's follow status doesn't seem to make a difference.