Do Nofollow Links Help SEO?
The question assumes a link only matters if it passes authority. Most of what a nofollow link does has nothing to do with that. Some of it is worth more than the ranking effect would have been.
What Nofollow Is And Why It Exists
Nofollow is an attribute a publisher can attach to a link to declare that it does not wish to vouch for the destination. Google introduced it in 2005, together with other search engines of the day. The reason it exists explains almost everything people find confusing about it.
The problem was comment spam. Blogs and forums let anybody post, which meant anybody could post links. A publisher running an open comment section had no way of distinguishing a reference it had chosen to make inside an article from a link somebody dropped into a comment box overnight. Both looked identical to a search engine, so publishers were effectively endorsing content they had never seen.
The attribute solved that by separating linking from endorsing. A publisher could keep its comments open, keep its forum running and keep quoting sources it had not verified, while stating that these particular links were not recommendations.
Read in that light the attribute is a statement about the publisher's relationship to the link rather than a verdict on the site being linked to. Nothing about it says the destination is poor. The wider anatomy of a link is covered in what backlinks are. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building.
From Instruction To Hint
For most of its life the attribute functioned as an instruction. A search engine encountering it would decline to pass any weight through that link. It would generally decline to follow it for discovery either.
Google announced in 2019 that it would move to treating the attribute as a hint rather than a directive. In its own framing, it would consider the declaration alongside everything else it knew rather than obeying it absolutely.
The temptation is to read that as nofollow links now counting. That is further than the announcement supports. Google has not published how it weighs the hint, under what circumstances it might disregard the declaration or what proportion of such links are treated differently. Anybody quoting a figure for how much authority a nofollow link now passes is inventing it.
What can be said is this. The attribute stopped being an absolute barrier and became one input among several. For a business making decisions, that shifts the practical conclusion in a specific direction: since the ranking effect is no longer definitively zero and was never the main benefit anyway, the attribute is a weak reason to accept or refuse anything.
What A Nofollow Link Still Does
None of the following depends on the attribute at all, which is why the original question is the wrong one to be asking.
It sends real visitors. A link in an article a trade publication's readers actually read produces clicks from people with a reason to be interested. Those people arrive whatever the attribute says. They are also the only outcome on this list that is fully measurable.
It gets a page discovered. A page that nothing points at is harder for anything to find. A link sitting in a widely read, frequently crawled article puts your page in front of the systems that need to know it exists.
It puts a brand in front of an audience. Somebody reading a national newspaper piece that names your firm may not click that day. They have still encountered you. Encountering a name repeatedly is how a name becomes familiar enough to be searched for later.
It builds corroboration that surfaces elsewhere. A reference in a credible publication is a fact about the world. It contributes to the general record of your business existing, operating and being worth mentioning, which is the sort of thing that shows up in places well beyond one ranking. That subject is taken further in how brand mentions support backlink authority.
Sponsored And User Generated
Alongside the change in treatment, Google introduced two further attributes in 2019 so that publishers could be more specific about what kind of link they were dealing with.
Sponsored declares that a link was paid for or is part of a commercial arrangement. Advertisements, sponsored features, affiliate links.
User generated declares that a link was placed by somebody other than the publisher: a commenter, a forum poster, a contributor to a listing.
The useful thing to understand is who these protect. A publisher that labels its paid links correctly is declaring its commercial arrangements openly, which is the position a publication wants to be in. One that takes payment for links and leaves them unlabelled is passing off advertising as editorial, which is a risk it carries itself.
So a request to have a paid placement marked as sponsored is not an insult and not a downgrade. It is a publication behaving properly. A business that pushes back against correct labelling is asking a publisher to accept risk on its behalf, which is a poor basis for a relationship and a signal about the arrangement itself.
Where Nofollow Links Naturally Sit
Whole categories of the web apply the attribute as standard policy. They include some of the most desirable places a business can be mentioned.
Major publications frequently apply it to outbound links across the board, as a blanket editorial position rather than a judgement on any individual destination. Social platforms apply it to nearly everything posted. Forums and community sites apply it to member contributions. Many directories apply it by default. Press release distribution services generally apply it to the links inside a release.
Consider what that means for a business doing genuinely well. It gets written about in the trade press, mentioned on social platforms, discussed in forums, listed in industry directories. A large share of the references a successful business accumulates carry the attribute, simply because that is the policy of the places worth being mentioned in.
Which produces a conclusion worth sitting with. A profile containing plenty of nofollow links looks like the profile of a business people talk about. A profile containing none, made up entirely of followed links, looks like something assembled deliberately, because no natural pattern of coverage produces that result.
Whether To Pursue Them Deliberately
Judge the opportunity by the audience and the credibility of the source. The attribute belongs near the bottom of the list of things that should influence the decision.
The questions worth asking are the same ones that apply to any link. Do your customers read this publication. Does being mentioned there make your business look better to a human being. Will anybody actually click. Is the source credible in your field. If the answers are yes, the attribute is close to irrelevant, because the reasons to want the coverage were never primarily about ranking.
There is one circumstance where it genuinely should change your decision. It is narrow. Suppose somebody asks you to pay specifically for a link. Suppose that link will then carry an attribute declaring it paid. You are paying for something whose ranking value the publisher has explicitly disclaimed. If the audience is worth the money on advertising terms, buy it as advertising with clear eyes. If the only reason to buy was the ranking effect, the labelling has told you what you are getting.
Otherwise the rule is simple. Take the coverage. Our guide to what relevance really means in backlink evaluation covers how to judge a source properly.
Common Mistakes
Three mistakes. The first is the expensive one.
Refusing coverage because the link is nofollow. Businesses turn down mentions in publications their customers actually read, on the basis that the link will not count. They have declined visitors, discovery, brand familiarity and a credible reference, in order to protect a ranking effect that was never the main benefit. It is the clearest example in this cluster of a metric overriding judgement.
Paying for followed links from places nobody reads. The same error in the opposite direction. A followed link on a site with no audience delivers no visitors, no credibility and no familiarity. Its ranking contribution is also the thing most likely to be discounted anyway. The attribute was the only attractive property, which is a poor reason to buy anything.
Treating the attribute as the only thing that matters. Auditing a profile by sorting on one column. It tells you nothing about whether the sources are relevant, whether the pages are read or whether the references were editorially given, which are the questions that decide whether any of it was worth having.
Take the coverage.
Judge the audience.
We pursue references that put your business in front of people who buy from you. We do not decline coverage over an attribute. No purchased placements, no networks, no price per link.
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Twenty four guides.
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This page covers one attribute. The rest of the series covers what makes a link valuable, what a mention achieves without a link, how patterns are detected and when links are not the right spend at all.
