Nofollow Links and SEO: What They Do to Your Rankings

Nofollow links do not pass PageRank in the traditional sense, but that does not mean they are worthless to your SEO. Since Google updated its treatment of the rel=”nofollow” attribute in 2019, these links have been treated as “hints” rather than hard directives, meaning Google may choose to use them when evaluating links and rankings. The practical answer is nuanced: nofollow links can contribute to your SEO indirectly, and in some cases more directly than most people assume.

I have spent a lot of time watching SEO teams operate, both inside agencies and on the client side. One of the most consistent patterns I see is the binary thinking around link types: dofollow good, nofollow useless. It is a workflow shortcut masquerading as strategy, and it causes teams to walk away from genuinely valuable placements because the attribute is wrong. That kind of rule-following without thinking is exactly how you end up optimising for the wrong thing.

What Is a Nofollow Link, and How Did We Get Here?

The rel=”nofollow” attribute was introduced by Google in 2005 as a way to combat comment spam. The idea was simple: if a site owner could mark a link as nofollow, spammers would have less incentive to flood blog comments and forums with links, because those links would not pass PageRank. For years, the rule was treated as absolute. Nofollow meant no equity, full stop.

In September 2019, Google changed the framework. They introduced two new link attributes, rel=”sponsored” for paid or affiliate links, and rel=”ugc” for user-generated content like comments and forum posts. At the same time, they reclassified all three, including the original nofollow, as hints rather than directives. Google’s own documentation states that these attributes are used as hints about which links to consider or exclude within search. That is a meaningful shift. It means the engine reserves the right to use nofollow links when it judges them to be credible signals.

The SEO community largely acknowledged this change and then continued behaving as if nothing had changed. Old habits in this industry are remarkably durable.

If you are building an SEO strategy from the ground up, or auditing the one you have, the full picture of how links, technical factors, and content work together is covered in the complete SEO strategy hub on The Marketing Juice.

Do Nofollow Links Pass Any SEO Value?

The honest answer is: sometimes, and it depends on how you define “SEO value.”

If you mean direct PageRank transfer, the evidence suggests that nofollow links pass little to none in most cases. Google’s systems are designed to discount them, and there is no reliable way to verify whether a specific nofollow link is being used as a hint in any given situation. Anyone who tells you they know exactly how Google handles a specific nofollow link is guessing.

But SEO value is not the same as PageRank. There are at least four ways a nofollow link can move the needle on your organic performance, none of which require the link to pass a single unit of equity.

First, referral traffic. A nofollow link from a high-traffic publication or forum can send hundreds or thousands of qualified visitors to your site. Those visitors create engagement signals, time on site, pages per session, return visits, that Google’s systems observe. Whether those signals influence rankings directly is debated, but they are not invisible to the algorithm.

Second, brand mentions and entity association. Google has invested heavily in understanding entities, brands, people, organisations, and how they relate to each other. A nofollow link from a credible source associates your brand with that source in Google’s knowledge graph. Over time, that kind of association can strengthen your site’s perceived authority in a topic area, even without direct equity transfer.

Third, crawl discovery. Google’s crawlers follow links regardless of their attribute. A nofollow link from a major site can accelerate the discovery and indexing of new pages on your domain. For sites with large content operations or frequent publishing schedules, this matters.

Fourth, link profile naturalness. A backlink profile composed entirely of dofollow links is a red flag. Real brands earn links from social media, press coverage, forums, and community sites, most of which apply nofollow. If your profile lacks these, it can look manufactured to a trained reviewer and, arguably, to algorithmic pattern detection.

The Sites That Give Nofollow Links Are Often the Ones Worth Getting

Here is the part that gets overlooked most often. The sites most likely to apply nofollow attributes are often the most authoritative and the most trafficked. Wikipedia uses nofollow on all external links. Reddit applies it across the board. Most major news publishers, the BBC, The Guardian, Forbes, apply nofollow to links in editorial content. Social platforms, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, all nofollow.

If your SEO team is filtering out these placements because they are nofollow, they are walking away from some of the most credible real estate on the internet. I have seen this happen in agency settings where the link-building team was working to a KPI of “dofollow links acquired per month.” The metric made sense in isolation, but it created perverse incentives. Teams started chasing lower-authority sites with dofollow links while ignoring high-authority nofollow opportunities. The output looked good on a spreadsheet and did very little for rankings.

This is the danger of SOPs that people follow without engaging their judgment. The rule, “prioritise dofollow links,” was reasonable when written. Applied without thought, it became a constraint that worked against the actual goal.

A nofollow link in a Wikipedia article on a topic directly relevant to your business is worth more to your brand than a dofollow link from a thin directory site that nobody visits. The referral traffic alone can justify the effort, and the association with Wikipedia’s credibility is not nothing, even if no PageRank moves.

Nofollow Links and Local SEO: A Different Calculation

For local businesses, the nofollow question has a slightly different texture. Many local citation sources, directories, review platforms, and community sites use nofollow on external links. If you applied a strict dofollow-only policy to local link building, you would exclude most of the ecosystem that local SEO depends on.

Consistency of NAP data (name, address, phone number) across local directories matters for local pack rankings. The link attribute is secondary to the citation itself. A nofollow mention of your business on a credible local directory, a chamber of commerce site, a regional news outlet, contributes to the local authority signals that Google uses to assess relevance for geo-specific queries. Semrush’s analysis of local SEO backlinks covers this in more detail and is worth reading if local search is part of your acquisition strategy.

The same logic applies to community-driven SEO signals more broadly. Moz’s work on community and SEO makes the case that participation in communities, forums, industry groups, generates nofollow links and brand mentions that compound over time. The value is not always visible in a standard link audit, but it shows up in traffic and in the breadth of queries a site starts ranking for.

When Nofollow Links Can Harm You

There are scenarios where nofollow links create problems, though they are less common than the SEO community’s anxiety about them suggests.

Paid links that are not properly tagged as sponsored can create compliance issues regardless of whether they are nofollow. Google’s guidelines require that paid placements be disclosed with the appropriate attribute. A nofollow on a paid link is better than nothing, but the sponsored attribute is the correct one to use. Getting this wrong is the kind of technical detail that Search Engine Journal’s SEO best practices guidance flags as an avoidable risk.

There is also the internal nofollow question. Some sites apply nofollow to internal links, often as a misguided attempt at PageRank sculpting. This practice was more relevant in the early 2000s and is largely counterproductive now. Nofollowing internal links does not concentrate equity where you want it. It just creates crawl inefficiency and can leave important pages under-resourced from an internal linking perspective. If you have nofollow on internal links, audit that and remove it.

The other scenario worth flagging is the use of nofollow on canonical tags. Cross-domain canonical tags are a separate mechanism for managing duplicate content, and they interact with link attributes in ways that can create unintended consequences. Search Engine Land’s coverage of cross-domain canonical tags is useful background if you are managing a multi-domain setup where this might be relevant.

How to Think About Nofollow Links in a Link Building Programme

I have run link building programmes at scale, and the most effective ones I have seen share a common characteristic: they are built around placement quality and audience relevance, not link attributes. The attribute is a secondary consideration, not the primary filter.

When I was growing the agency from a small team to over a hundred people, we built out content and PR functions that generated coverage in industry publications, national press, and trade media. Most of those links were nofollow. The organic traffic we drove from that coverage, and the brand authority it built, contributed to client results in ways that a pure dofollow link count would never have captured. The clients who understood this got better outcomes than the ones who were fixated on link attribute metrics.

A practical framework for link building that accounts for nofollow links properly looks something like this:

Evaluate placements on domain authority, topical relevance, and likely referral traffic first. The link attribute comes after those criteria, not before. If a placement scores well on the primary criteria and is nofollow, pursue it. If a placement is dofollow but low-authority and irrelevant, pass on it.

Track referral traffic from nofollow links separately in your analytics. This makes the value visible to stakeholders who might otherwise dismiss these placements. When you can show that a nofollow link from a major publication drove 2,000 qualified visitors in a month, the conversation about link attributes becomes much easier.

Monitor your link profile’s dofollow to nofollow ratio as a health indicator, not as a performance metric. A ratio of roughly 60:40 or 70:30 dofollow to nofollow is broadly typical for a natural-looking profile, though this varies significantly by industry and site type. What you are looking for is a profile that reflects how real brands earn links, not one that looks like it was assembled by a link-building operation.

There is a broader point here about SEO complexity. The industry has a tendency to over-engineer its frameworks, adding layers of rules and filters until the original goal gets buried. Nofollow versus dofollow is a good example of a simple technical distinction that gets inflated into a strategic principle it was never meant to be. HubSpot’s perspective on SEO and broader business goals is a useful reminder that the discipline exists to drive business outcomes, not to optimise link attribute ratios.

The Sponsored and UGC Attributes: Where They Fit

Since Google introduced the sponsored and ugc attributes alongside the 2019 nofollow update, it is worth being clear about when each applies.

rel=”sponsored” should be used on any link that exists because of a commercial arrangement: affiliate links, paid placements, advertorial content. This is not optional from a compliance standpoint. Google is explicit that paid links should be disclosed, and the sponsored attribute is the mechanism for doing that.

rel=”ugc” is appropriate for links in user-generated content: blog comments, forum posts, community contributions. If you run a platform where users can post links, ugc is the correct attribute to apply. It signals to Google that the link was not editorially placed by the site owner.

rel=”nofollow” remains the catch-all for links you want to flag as non-endorsed but that do not fall into the paid or ugc categories. Editorial links in press releases are a common example, as are links in certain types of partner content where you want to be transparent about the relationship without triggering the sponsored classification.

In practice, many site owners use nofollow as a default for all three scenarios. Google has indicated it will interpret the intent reasonably, but using the right attribute is cleaner and reduces ambiguity.

What the Evidence Actually Suggests

I am careful about citing specific studies in this area because the SEO industry has a long history of presenting correlation as causation and small-sample tests as definitive findings. What I can say with confidence, based on years of running campaigns and watching what moves rankings, is the following.

Sites that earn nofollow links from genuinely authoritative sources tend to perform better in organic search than their link profiles alone would predict. Whether this is because Google is using those links as hints, because the same editorial standards that produce nofollow links also produce strong content, or because the referral traffic generates positive engagement signals, is difficult to isolate. Probably all three contribute.

What is clear is that treating nofollow links as worthless, and building your link acquisition strategy around that assumption, leaves value on the table. The sites that rank consistently well in competitive categories almost always have diverse link profiles that include significant nofollow components. That is not a coincidence.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, which gave me a different vantage point on marketing effectiveness. One thing that struck me was how often the campaigns that won were the ones that built genuine brand presence across multiple channels, rather than optimising hard for a single metric. The same principle applies to SEO. Obsessing over dofollow link count while ignoring brand authority, referral traffic, and link profile diversity is the search equivalent of optimising for click-through rate while ignoring conversion. You can win the metric and lose the business outcome.

For a more complete view of how link strategy fits into broader SEO execution, the complete SEO strategy guide on The Marketing Juice covers the full picture, from technical foundations to content and authority building.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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