Now everyone seems to think that adding links in the profile and "About this video" section will help your Google page rank and inbound links to your site. Well here is proof below that it just isn't true! Now if you are using Firefox there is a great tool called Search Status. This is a great add on tool for Firefox and  can show you lots of stuff you may not be aware of within yours and well, anyones website.

The most important use is the "Highlight nofollow links" tool. Take a look at the picture on the left of my YouTube account, what is highlighted in pink is "nofollowed" which means that it will NOT count as a link back to your site and is in effect useless to your page rank and inbound link count.

Now this may be bad news but it is important to understand the difference in getting links to your site and getting traffic to your site. If you goal is simply to increase page rank, sites like YouTube won't help but if your goal is to get traffic than this will definantly help.

Getting traffic is probably the most important component to any successful website so it is not all bad, just make sure you have a link to back to your website in your video and in your profile and video details section. It may not count as a link but if it gets people to your site than it is worth the effort and don't forget to make your video original enough that people will want to check out your site, I talk more about avoiding the "B" word in Boring is the Death of Online Video.

IMPORTANT NOTE**** Use this tool to check out all your link partners to see if they are really giving your links the attention they deserve. If you come across one of your links in bold with the serach status tool, they are not playing fair and should be dropped immediantly!Check out your potential link partners before you get a link from them, know who your link partners are!

Unfortunately Youtube and many other video sites will not be one of those partners but many of them have so many viewers that it becomes beneficial in other ways.

Tags: nofollow, Online Video, video traffic, youtube