My impression is local plumbers don't care about SEO. They don't care about scale. They care about making money. They don't need SEO for it, they need to of

My impression is local plumbers don't care about SEO. They don't care about scale. They care about making money. They don't need SEO for it, they need to offer a good service. Links with a no follow attribute do have some value, it won't do anything for PageRank but it's social proof. I haven't done the test but others did; it pushes someone higher in the search rankings. Hundreds of no follow links were needed. I'm not sure that's always the case. Let's hope not because my local plumber is never going to get that. Nor does he care. That being said, I think Google has its own internal Klout system. "With startups and side projects, isn't the end result of this sort of thing that people have to create blogs/guides/content that is outside their core focus?" You're right. But it has to somehow relate to what your start up is doing, otherwise it won't get you a lot of traffic, nor will it do a lot to push you higher in the search rankings. Edit: spelling The -> They