It has been commonplace for big social networking sites to add nofollow tags to users profile links over time and now LinkedIn has gone the same way by adding a nofollow tag to the links you are allowed to post to your profile.

This is disappointing news for link builders, as these were easy-to-build links that did pass some small amount of link juice which was worth the amount of time required to build them.

This means that of all the current popular social networking sites; Facebook, Twitter (ok, it’s not exactly a social network, but it lies in the same realm), Myspace and LinkedIn do not pass any link juice to your website.

Whilst LinkedIn has caused a few heads to drop because of this decision, YouTube (owned by Google) has gone the other way and removed the nofollow tags that used to be on profile hyperlinks. You’ll still be unable pass benefit to any one phrase, but an additional link like this could be of benefit in terms of indexing.

This could also be a bonus for viral video marketing campaigners, so it will be interesting to see how this impacts organic search listings in the coming months.

Unfortunately, I haven’t collected any results from a test that I am running to find out it if this passes much or any benefit at all, and I remain far from the stage of recommending to clients that they “must have” a youtube account for link benefit.

However, for those with a YouTube profile already, take advantage now by putting a link to your website up while Google are being so generous.