Nofollow Links and SEO: What They Do for Your Rankings

Nofollow links do not pass PageRank directly, but dismissing them as worthless is a mistake most SEOs eventually regret. Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, meaning crawlers may still follow and index linked pages, and the indirect effects on visibility, traffic, and link profile diversity are real enough to matter in a competitive landscape.

The short answer: nofollow links are not a primary ranking driver, but they contribute to a healthy, natural-looking link profile, they drive referral traffic, and in some cases they influence how Google perceives your site’s authority and relevance over time.

What Does Nofollow Actually Mean?

The nofollow attribute was introduced by Google in 2005 as a way to combat comment spam. The original intent was simple: add rel="nofollow" to a link and tell Google not to follow it or pass any ranking credit through it. For years, that is exactly how it worked. Nofollow meant a hard stop. No crawl, no PageRank transfer, no SEO value.

That changed in September 2019 when Google announced it would treat nofollow as a hint rather than an instruction. The update also introduced two new link attributes: rel="ugc" for user-generated content like forum posts and comments, and rel="sponsored" for paid placements. Google said it would use all three attributes as signals when understanding links, rather than ignoring them outright.

What this means in practice is that Google can now choose to crawl and index a nofollowed link if its algorithms determine there is value in doing so. It does not mean every nofollow link suddenly passes PageRank. It means the relationship between nofollow and SEO value became more nuanced than a binary on/off switch.

If you want to build a complete picture of how links fit into a broader ranking strategy, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers everything from link signals to technical foundations and content architecture in one place.

Why a Nofollow-Only Link Profile Is a Red Flag

I have reviewed hundreds of link audits over the years, and one of the patterns that consistently flags a problem is an unnaturally clean link profile. Either everything is dofollow and suspiciously editorial, or everything is nofollow and clearly acquired rather than earned. Neither extreme looks like a site that has grown organically.

When I was running an agency and we were building out link strategies for clients across retail, finance, and professional services, we always built in a mix. Not because we were gaming anything, but because that is what a real web presence looks like. You get mentioned in a forum. Someone links to you from their blog with nofollow because their CMS applies it by default. A journalist cites you but their publication uses nofollow on external links. A Wikipedia editor adds your site as a reference. These are nofollow links, and they are signs of a legitimate, active presence on the web.

A site with zero nofollow links and a perfectly curated dofollow profile is a site that has been manually built, and Google’s algorithms are increasingly good at identifying that pattern. The nofollow links in your profile are not dead weight. They are part of the evidence that your link acquisition is natural.

This is one of those areas where over-engineering the strategy creates more risk than it removes. I have seen agencies obsess over dofollow ratios and strip out perfectly legitimate nofollow outreach from their campaigns because someone decided only dofollow links count. That thinking is both outdated and commercially damaging.

The Referral Traffic Argument Is Underrated

SEOs have a tendency to evaluate links almost entirely through the lens of PageRank and ranking signals. It is an understandable bias, but it misses something important: links are also traffic channels.

A nofollow link from a high-traffic publication, a popular Reddit thread, or a well-read industry newsletter can send thousands of qualified visitors to your site. Those visitors behave in ways that create secondary signals. They spend time on your pages. They share content. Some of them search for your brand name later. A percentage convert. None of that requires the link to be dofollow.

I have seen this play out in analytics more times than I can count. A client gets a mention in a major trade publication with a nofollow link. Organic traffic does not move immediately, but referral traffic spikes, branded search volume increases over the following weeks, and a few months later the organic numbers start to shift. Is the nofollow link directly responsible for the ranking improvement? No. But the chain of events it set off contributed to it.

This is the kind of indirect attribution that gets lost when teams focus exclusively on link attributes. SEO activity creates downstream effects that do not always show up cleanly in ranking reports, and nofollow links are a good example of that dynamic in action.

Where Nofollow Links Come From and Why It Matters

Not all nofollow links are created equal, and the source matters far more than the attribute. A nofollow link from a page with genuine authority and relevance to your industry is worth more than a dofollow link from a low-quality directory that nobody visits.

Common sources of nofollow links include:

• News and media sites that apply nofollow to all external links as editorial policy
• Wikipedia, which uses nofollow on all outbound links but still drives meaningful referral traffic and brand credibility
• Social media platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook
• Forum platforms like Reddit and Quora
• Comment sections on blogs and news sites
• Many CMS platforms that apply nofollow by default to user-submitted content

The fact that a major news outlet uses nofollow on external links does not make a mention in that outlet worthless. The brand association, the referral traffic, and the signal that your content or business is considered credible enough to reference all carry weight. Building a sustainable SEO presence requires thinking about links as part of a broader visibility strategy, not just as PageRank conduits.

Wikipedia deserves a specific mention here. A Wikipedia citation is nofollow, full stop. But the number of sites that cite Wikipedia as a source, the traffic it generates, and the implicit credibility signal of being referenced in an encyclopedia entry are all real. I would take a Wikipedia citation over most dofollow links from mid-tier guest post farms without a second thought.

The 2019 Update and What It Changed in Practice

Google’s 2019 announcement was more significant than most SEOs gave it credit for at the time. The shift from directive to hint was not just semantic housekeeping. It reflected a more sophisticated approach to understanding the web’s link graph.

Before 2019, Google’s official position was that nofollow links were ignored entirely. That was always somewhat implausible given the sheer volume of nofollow links on the web and the value of the information they represent. The 2019 update simply made the actual behaviour more transparent.

What changed in practice:

• Google can now use nofollow links for crawling and indexing purposes if it determines there is value in doing so
• The new UGC and sponsored attributes give Google more granular context about why a link was placed, which feeds into how it evaluates the link’s signal value
• Link disavow decisions became slightly more complex, because a nofollow link you were previously told to ignore might now carry some weight

The practical implication for most sites is not dramatic. You do not need to rethink your entire link strategy because of this update. But it does reinforce the point that treating nofollow links as completely valueless is an oversimplification that predates the current reality of how Google processes them.

Moz’s analysis of where SEO is heading consistently points toward Google’s increasing sophistication in evaluating signals holistically rather than in isolation, and the nofollow update fits squarely into that trend.

Sponsored and UGC Attributes: What You Need to Do

Since 2019, Google has asked publishers to use rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content. The existing nofollow attribute remains valid for general use. You can also combine attributes, so rel="nofollow ugc" is perfectly acceptable.

For most sites, the practical changes are modest. If you run a blog with comments enabled, switching those links to rel="ugc" is the right move and most modern CMS platforms handle this automatically. If you publish sponsored content or run affiliate links, using rel="sponsored" is both Google’s recommendation and the correct approach under their webmaster guidelines.

What you should not do is panic about retroactively updating every nofollow link on your site. Google has been clear that nofollow remains a valid attribute and that the new attributes are preferred but not mandatory. This is an area where the industry has a tendency to overcomplicate things. Apply the right attribute going forward, update high-volume UGC sections if it is practical to do so, and move on.

I spent years watching agencies build elaborate processes around things that made almost no commercial difference while ignoring the fundamentals that actually moved revenue. Link attribute housekeeping falls firmly in the second category: worth getting right, not worth losing sleep over.

When Nofollow Links Are Worth Pursuing Deliberately

There is a difference between accepting nofollow links as a natural part of your link profile and actively pursuing them as a strategy. Both have their place, but the calculus is different.

Nofollow links are worth pursuing deliberately when:

• The source drives significant referral traffic to your target audience
• The brand association or credibility signal is commercially valuable even without ranking benefit
• The link is from a platform where dofollow links are not available but the audience reach justifies the effort
• You are building brand presence in a new market or vertical where visibility matters more than PageRank in the short term

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, a significant part of our new business pipeline came from brand visibility that had nothing to do with organic rankings. Speaking slots, industry press mentions, award entries, thought leadership placements. Most of those generated nofollow links at best. But they built the kind of brand recognition that meant when a prospect was ready to appoint an agency, we were already on their radar. The attribution never showed up cleanly in a ranking report. The commercial impact was real.

The same logic applies to SEO. A nofollow link from a publication your target customers actually read is a business asset. Treating it as worthless because it does not pass PageRank is a category error.

When Nofollow Links Are Not Worth Chasing

The flip side is equally important. Not every nofollow link opportunity deserves your time, and some are actively counterproductive.

Nofollow links from low-quality, irrelevant, or spammy sources carry no SEO benefit and can contribute to a link profile that looks manipulated. Comment spam on unrelated blogs, forum posts on irrelevant communities, and low-traffic directory submissions are all examples of nofollow link building that wastes time and adds noise to your profile without adding value.

The test is simple: if the link were dofollow, would you still want it based on the quality and relevance of the source? If the answer is no, the nofollow version is not worth having either. Source quality is the primary filter. The attribute is secondary.

B2B SEO strategy in particular benefits from this kind of quality-first thinking, where the audience is smaller and the credibility signals from where you are mentioned carry more weight than link volume alone.

How to Evaluate Nofollow Links in Your Existing Profile

If you are conducting a link audit, here is a practical framework for assessing your nofollow links rather than dismissing them wholesale.

First, segment your nofollow links by source type. News and media mentions, Wikipedia citations, social platforms, and forum links all behave differently and carry different signals. Lumping them together as “nofollow, therefore irrelevant” is analytically lazy.

Second, check whether high-value nofollow sources are driving referral traffic. Pull the data from your analytics platform and look at sessions, engagement metrics, and conversion rates from those referral sources. If a nofollow link from an industry publication is sending 500 qualified visitors a month, that is a commercially meaningful asset regardless of its SEO attribute.

Third, look at your nofollow to dofollow ratio in the context of your industry. There is no universal target, and anyone who tells you there is a specific ratio you should be aiming for is guessing. But if your profile is heavily skewed in either direction compared to competitors with similar profiles, that is worth investigating.

Fourth, flag any nofollow links that look spammy or irrelevant for disavowal consideration. The 2019 update does not mean Google ignores all nofollow links, which means low-quality nofollow links are no longer entirely harmless by default.

Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush both surface nofollow links in their backlink reports, and SEMrush’s research into on-page and off-page signals is worth reading for context on how different factors interact in practice.

The Bigger Picture: Links as Part of a System

The nofollow question is really a proxy for a more important question: how do you think about links as part of an overall SEO and marketing system?

The sites that consistently perform well in search are not the ones that have optimised every link attribute and obsessed over PageRank flow diagrams. They are the ones that have built genuine authority in their space, created content worth linking to, and developed a presence across the web that reflects real credibility. Nofollow links are a natural consequence of that kind of presence.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, the work that stood out was not the work that had executed every tactical element perfectly. It was the work that had a clear commercial objective and built a coherent strategy around it. The same principle applies to SEO. Tactical precision matters less than strategic coherence.

Nofollow links matter. Not as a primary ranking lever, but as part of a healthy, credible web presence that supports long-term organic performance. Dismissing them entirely is as much of an error as treating them as equivalent to high-authority dofollow links.

If you are building out a complete approach to search, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers the full picture, from technical foundations and content strategy through to link building and performance measurement, so you can see how each element fits together rather than optimising them in isolation.

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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