Domain never existed before?

I cannot swear that domain had not existed before, but I do know the client owned it for at least a year, most likely longer. 

We've noticed that Yahoo shows nofollow backlinks as well as non-existant (anymore) in their backlink results around 2 years ago - there is value in this data and that's why we decided to keep it too.

I did an experiment with Blogdrive that is a no follow blog. Guess who follows it. Think of msn? BINGo!

Wonderul, this experiment approves my assumptions somewhat, But I still have doubts about does yahoo wieghts dofollow  & nofollow links differently, Google does for sure!

I've seen this several times on various sites - it's definitely going on and like kitz007 I want to know about whether weight is given to these in any way.   I'm working on a test to find out....

I think you bring up a great questions - does no follow links give very little or zero link juice?  I have always believed that Google gives them a fat zero while yahoo and bing gave very little juice.

You mentioned that you don't have google webmaster tools, i would be curious to see once you register (if you do) if there was a link or two in their you didn't get through blog commenting.

Excellent article, David. The last paragraph sums it all up quite nicely:"The conclusion I would draw from this is that people really should not focus on the NoFollow/DoFollow issue. Build links that are officially followable when you can, but don’t let a NoFollow attribute in a page’s links dissuade you from creating a link you would otherwise pursue." Enough said.

One of these days I'm going to do an experiment with a brand new site that I'm only going to build links to with blog comments and see what happens. I just have to get around to it!

don't forget that googlebot will crawl your new domain as soon as it's registered, anyway.

Nofollow should never be ignored. After all, Google is not the only search engine around.

Be careful of pulling results from this limited experiement!!!

Here are some points that would need to be considered...

1) Google and other SEs still crawl nofollow links - they have said that - the attribute is only a way to indicate that the link is "paid or not trusted". SEs still find relavance ("what your site is about") in anchor text. What needs to be asked here is... did you target a specific anchor text in the nofollow links?

2) Sites can rank in top 10 with one or few links -  there many ranking factors - whats was the KW? What was the GEO? How did you search IP search preferences + history?

3) Honeymoon rankings on new domains happen a lot - long term rankings vs some quick exposure are different realities! Time comparison of ranking changes would be required.

4) What is the competition doing - maybe competitors are under optimized on page and offpage - what are the strength of their portfolio

5) Is there something else going on - domain name ("exactkeyword".com) etc

Basically - understand that there are too many other issues ignored to make assumptions here.  Nofollow links will always be reported in Yahoo and google - does not mean they pass authority.

As I just mentioned on the blog post, I've seen this hold true with a client and a competitor. An excellent article.