Is the DoFollow vs NoFollow ratio important?

[Jiri.Novotny]

Our website has almost 50/50 ratio of dofollow and nofollow links, and our competitors have "better" ratios (more dofollow links).

I suspect it is mainly due to Twitter - several of my blog posts went viral, and had thousands of tweets in total - and twitter links are all nofollow. But I'm not sure about that - do these link count?

Also, do you think that this could cause problems? Should I worry about writing too much viral content without building traditional links first?

[RyanKent]

Is the DoFollow vs NoFollow ratio important?

The primary importance is earning organic (natural) links to your site. Both follow and nofollow links are a natural part of the web. If you focus on earning legitimate links to your site, you have nothing to worry about. Whatever the ratio works out as, so be it.

If you engage in manipulative link building practices, then you have to constantly worry about being discovered and penalized. The ratio of follow vs nofollow link is one of many metrics a search engine can examine as a possible flag for guideline violations.

Should I worry about writing too much viral content without building traditional links first?

Absolutely not. This type of problem is one most webmasters dream of having.

[ChrisDyson]

As Ryan mentioned the ratio is not important the only difference is do follow pass PR no follow do not.

[James77]

Ryan is correct. You should not worry about it - if worry about it then you will naturally try to alter the ratio to something that is NOT natural.

My guess is that there is a flag in googles algorithm when it see's a ratio of dofollow to nofollow that is well above the norm. SEO's concentrate on dofollow links, therefore it is an indication of possible manipulative tactics if you see a very high ratio (one that would not occur naturally).