Nofollow Links and SEO: What They Do and Don’t Do

Nofollow links do not pass PageRank in the traditional sense, but that does not mean they are worthless to your SEO. Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, which means some nofollow links may influence how your pages are understood and discovered. The honest answer is that they matter less than dofollow links for raw ranking power, but dismissing them entirely is a mistake most experienced SEOs have learned not to make.

I have sat in enough SEO strategy sessions to know that nofollow links tend to produce one of two reactions. Either someone dismisses them as dead weight, or someone overclaims their value to justify a PR budget. Neither position holds up under scrutiny. The reality is more nuanced, and it is worth working through properly.

What Nofollow Actually Means

The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google in 2005 as a way to let webmasters signal that a link should not be used to pass PageRank or influence search rankings. The original use case was blog comment spam. If you could mark links in your comments section as nofollow, you removed the incentive for spammers to post links there. It was a sensible, practical solution to a real problem.

For years, the rule was simple: nofollow links do not count. They do not pass link equity. They do not help rankings. Many SEOs treated them as invisible for all practical purposes.

In September 2019, Google changed that position. They announced that nofollow would be treated as a hint rather than a directive. This was not a minor semantic shift. It meant Google reserved the right to use nofollow links for crawling, indexing, and potentially ranking purposes if their systems determined it was appropriate. At the same time, they introduced two new link attributes: rel=”sponsored” for paid or affiliate links, and rel=”ugc” for user-generated content. The nofollow attribute remained valid for general use, but the ecosystem became more structured.

This change matters because it moved the conversation away from a binary yes/no framework. The question is no longer whether nofollow links count. The question is under what circumstances they might, and what else they contribute beyond raw PageRank.

If you want to understand how this fits into a broader approach to building search visibility, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers the full picture, from technical foundations through to link acquisition and content positioning.

Does Google Use Nofollow Links for Ranking?

Google has not confirmed that nofollow links directly influence rankings. What they have confirmed is that their systems can use nofollow links as hints when crawling and indexing. Whether that crawling and indexing activity translates into ranking benefit is a different question, and one Google has been deliberately vague about.

There are a few things we can say with reasonable confidence. First, Google follows nofollow links for discovery purposes. If a high-authority site links to your page with a nofollow attribute, Google will likely crawl that page. Getting crawled is not the same as getting ranked, but it is a prerequisite. Second, there is a reasonable argument that links from genuinely authoritative sources, even with nofollow attributes, contribute to how Google understands the context and credibility of your content. This is not the same as passing PageRank, but it is not nothing either.

The SEO industry has spent years trying to isolate the ranking contribution of nofollow links, and the honest conclusion is that it is very difficult to measure cleanly. There are too many confounding variables. A link from a major news publication is nofollow, but it also drives traffic, generates brand searches, and often leads to secondary dofollow links from other sites that pick up the story. Attributing a ranking improvement to the nofollow link itself is methodologically messy.

What I would say, having managed link acquisition across a lot of different industries, is that the sites with the strongest organic visibility tend to have a diverse, natural-looking link profile that includes nofollow links from credible sources. That correlation does not prove causation, but it does suggest that chasing only dofollow links is not how the best-performing sites actually operate.

The Referral Traffic Argument

When I ran the performance division at iProspect, we were managing significant paid search budgets alongside organic programmes. One thing that became clear over time was that the cleanest way to think about nofollow links was not through the lens of PageRank at all, but through the lens of traffic quality.

A nofollow link from a well-read industry publication sends real people to your site. Those people engage with your content, or they do not. They convert, or they do not. They return, or they do not. All of that behaviour is visible to Google through Chrome data, search console signals, and other inputs. A page that consistently receives high-quality referral traffic and produces strong engagement signals is likely to be treated differently by Google’s systems than a page that only receives links but no actual visitors.

This is not a fringe theory. It is a straightforward application of how search engines work. Google is trying to identify pages that are genuinely useful to people. Behavioural signals from real users are one of the inputs into that assessment. Nofollow links that drive meaningful traffic are contributing to those signals, even if they are not passing PageRank in the traditional sense.

The implication is that a nofollow link from a site with a large, engaged audience is more valuable than a dofollow link from a site that nobody reads. This should be obvious, but it gets lost when people reduce link value to a single attribute.

Link Profile Naturalness

One of the clearest signals that a link profile has been manipulated is when it contains almost no nofollow links. In the real world, links accumulate from a wide variety of sources: social media, press coverage, Wikipedia, forums, directories, partner sites, and editorial content. Many of these are nofollow by default. A site that has been aggressively building links through outreach or purchase often ends up with an unnaturally high proportion of dofollow links because the people doing the building are deliberately seeking them out.

Google’s spam detection systems are sophisticated. A link profile that looks engineered rather than earned is a risk signal. Nofollow links from diverse, credible sources are part of what makes a link profile look legitimate. This is not an argument for artificially adding nofollow links. It is an argument for not dismissing earned nofollow placements because they do not tick the PageRank box.

I have seen this play out in audits. A site that has been through an aggressive link-building campaign sometimes has a profile that looks almost suspicious in how clean it is: high domain authority sources, almost all dofollow, very little variation in anchor text distribution. Contrast that with a site that has grown more organically, with press mentions, social shares, community links, and a mix of followed and nofollowed editorial links. The second profile tends to be more durable under algorithm updates.

The Moz Whiteboard Friday on SEO priorities for 2026 touches on this shift toward profile quality over raw link counts, which aligns with how the industry has been moving for several years.

Sponsored and UGC Attributes: What Changed in Practice

The 2019 update introduced two new attributes alongside the nofollow change. Rel=”sponsored” is intended for paid placements, including affiliate links and advertorial content. Rel=”ugc” is for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. Google encouraged webmasters to use these more specific attributes where applicable, while confirming that nofollow remained valid as a catch-all.

The practical implications are worth understanding. If you are running an affiliate programme and your partners are linking to you without the sponsored attribute, you are technically not following Google’s guidelines. More importantly, Google can likely identify paid links through other signals anyway. Using the correct attribute is not just about compliance. It is about giving Google accurate information about the nature of the link, which is how you avoid being caught in a situation where a manual reviewer decides your link profile looks manipulative.

For most marketing teams, the day-to-day implication is simpler: when you are doing outreach for coverage or partnerships, understand what attribute the linking site is likely to use, and factor that into your assessment of the placement. A sponsored attribute on a link from a high-traffic publication is not worthless. It still drives traffic and brand awareness. But it should not be counted the same way as an editorial dofollow link when you are assessing the SEO value of a placement.

The Search Engine Land piece on canonical tags and cross-domain signals is a useful reminder of how Google uses technical attributes as hints rather than hard rules, a pattern that applies equally to link attributes.

Where Nofollow Links Come From in Practice

Understanding the sources of nofollow links helps you think about them more practically. The most common sources are:

Press and media coverage. Most major news publications apply nofollow to outbound links as a matter of policy. A mention in a national newspaper or industry trade publication is almost certainly going to be nofollow. This does not make it less valuable from a brand or traffic perspective, and as discussed above, the indirect SEO benefits are real.

Social media. Links from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and most other social platforms are nofollow. They do not pass PageRank. They can, however, drive substantial traffic and create the conditions for secondary links from people who discover your content through social and then reference it on their own sites.

Wikipedia. All external links from Wikipedia are nofollow. Getting a Wikipedia citation is still considered valuable by many SEOs, primarily because of the traffic and credibility signals it creates rather than any direct PageRank benefit.

Forums and community sites. Reddit, Quora, and similar platforms use nofollow or ugc attributes on links. Again, the traffic value can be significant even without PageRank transfer.

Directories and listings. Many business directories use nofollow on their listings. Local SEO practitioners still pursue these for citation consistency and local pack visibility, which operates through different mechanisms than standard PageRank.

The pattern across all of these is that nofollow links cluster around sources that have genuine credibility and real audiences. That is not a coincidence. It is a reason to take them seriously.

The Mistake of Optimising the Attribute Instead of the Outcome

When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the things that struck me about the losing entries was how often teams had optimised a metric rather than an outcome. They had hit their awareness numbers but missed on sales. They had achieved their reach targets but failed to move consideration. The metric became the goal, and the actual business objective got lost somewhere along the way.

The same thing happens in link building when teams focus exclusively on dofollow links. The dofollow attribute becomes the proxy for value, and anything without it gets deprioritised or dismissed. This is a workflow problem. The SOP says “pursue dofollow links”, and people follow it without asking whether a given nofollow placement might actually be more valuable in context.

I have seen this cause real missed opportunities. A client in a competitive B2B sector was offered a feature in a major industry publication. The publication used nofollow on all external links. The SEO team pushed back because it would not contribute to their dofollow link count. The marketing director, to his credit, overruled them. The piece ran, drove several hundred qualified visitors, generated two secondary dofollow links from smaller publications that covered the same story, and contributed to a brand search uplift that was visible in Search Console over the following months.

The nofollow attribute was irrelevant to the actual outcome. The placement was valuable. The framework that would have rejected it was not serving the business.

This is a broader point about how SEO processes can calcify into rules that made sense when they were written but stop being examined critically. Copyblogger’s piece on the SEO industry’s branding problem gets at something related: the tendency to reduce complex decisions to simple rules and then defend those rules long after the context has changed.

How to Think About Nofollow Links in Your Strategy

The practical framework I use is straightforward. Evaluate links on three dimensions, not one.

PageRank potential. Is this link likely to pass link equity? Dofollow links from high-authority, topically relevant sites score highest here. Nofollow links score lower, but not zero, given the hint-based treatment Google now applies.

Traffic quality. Will this link send real people to your site? A nofollow link from a publication with 500,000 monthly readers is likely to outperform a dofollow link from a site with 200 monthly visitors on this dimension. Traffic from credible sources creates behavioural signals that matter.

Brand and credibility signals. Does this placement contribute to how your brand is perceived, both by potential customers and by Google’s systems? Coverage in respected publications, even with nofollow links, builds the kind of brand presence that supports organic visibility over time.

When you assess link opportunities across all three dimensions, nofollow links often score well enough to be worth pursuing. The mistake is using only the first dimension and ignoring the other two.

Tools like Semrush’s SEO split-testing research illustrate how difficult it is to isolate individual ranking factors, which is a useful reminder that single-variable thinking rarely captures how search engines actually work.

If you are building out a more complete approach to link acquisition, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers how link building fits alongside technical SEO, content strategy, and on-page optimisation as part of a coherent programme rather than a set of disconnected tactics.

What Good Nofollow Link Acquisition Looks Like

You should not be building nofollow links in the same way you build dofollow links. The tactics are different because the sources are different.

PR and media relations is the most natural channel for nofollow link acquisition. If you are producing genuinely newsworthy content, data, or commentary, press coverage follows. The links will mostly be nofollow. That is fine. The value is in the coverage, the traffic, and the brand signals, not the attribute.

Thought leadership on platforms like LinkedIn, industry forums, and community sites generates nofollow links but builds the kind of authority that leads to editorial dofollow links elsewhere. People who encounter your thinking in one place often reference it on their own sites, and those references are frequently dofollow.

Resource creation, tools, and original research tend to attract both dofollow and nofollow links naturally. A well-constructed industry report will be cited by journalists (nofollow), referenced by bloggers (often dofollow), and shared across social platforms (nofollow). The mix is healthy and looks natural because it is natural.

What you should not do is pursue nofollow links from low-quality sources on the basis that they contribute to profile diversity. A nofollow link from a spam site is still a signal you do not want. The quality of the source matters regardless of the attribute. Search Engine Land’s piece on in-house SEO expertise is worth reading on the broader question of how SEO decisions get made and where judgment is often lacking.

The Measurement Problem

One reason nofollow links get undervalued is that their contribution is genuinely hard to measure. You cannot point to a nofollow link and say it moved a ranking by a specific number of positions. The effects are diffuse: some referral traffic here, some brand search uplift there, some secondary links from downstream coverage. None of it shows up cleanly in a standard link-building report.

This is a measurement problem, not a value problem. Marketing has always struggled with activities whose effects are real but indirect. Brand advertising faces the same challenge. The solution is not to stop doing things that are hard to measure. It is to develop better frameworks for assessing value across multiple dimensions, and to be honest about what you can and cannot attribute cleanly.

When I ran agencies, one of the disciplines I tried to instil was the distinction between what we could measure and what we could observe. We could not always measure the direct contribution of a PR placement to organic rankings. We could observe that brand search volume increased after major coverage. We could observe that referral traffic from press mentions correlated with periods of stronger organic performance. Those observations are not proof, but they are evidence, and evidence is what you work with when proof is unavailable.

The Optimizely SEO checklist takes a similarly practical approach to SEO measurement, treating it as a set of ongoing observations rather than a one-time audit, which is the right framing for a channel this complex.

The Bottom Line on Nofollow Links

Nofollow links are not as valuable as high-quality dofollow links for direct ranking impact. That is true and worth stating clearly. But the gap between the two is smaller than it was before 2019, and the non-PageRank value of nofollow links has always been real.

A sensible link acquisition strategy does not chase nofollow links as an end in themselves. It pursues placements that are genuinely valuable, and accepts that many of those placements will be nofollow because that is how the web works. Press coverage is nofollow. Social is nofollow. Wikipedia is nofollow. These are not consolation prizes. They are part of how credible sites accumulate the kind of presence that sustains organic visibility over time.

The teams that get this right tend to think about link acquisition as a subset of brand building rather than as a purely technical exercise. They ask whether a placement is worth having on its own terms, and then they factor in the SEO implications rather than the other way around. That sequencing produces better decisions and, over time, better results.

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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