Do nofollow links help SEO? The honest answer

Not directly, no. A nofollow link on its own won’t push your rankings up. But that’s not the same as saying nofollow links are worthless, and treating them that way is one of the more common mistakes we see in link-building strategy. Since 2019, Google no longer ignores nofollow links outright; it treats the attribute as a hint, not a hard block, and the indirect value of these links (referral traffic, brand visibility, faster discovery, a natural-looking link profile) is often bigger than people assume.

If you’re building out a link building strategy, understanding exactly what nofollow does (and doesn’t) do is worth getting right, because a lot of the advice still floating around dates from before Google changed the rules.

What a nofollow link actually is

A nofollow link is a normal hyperlink with one small piece of HTML added to it: rel=”nofollow”. It looks like this:

html

<a href=”https://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>example</a>

That attribute was originally a direct instruction to search engines: don’t pass any ranking credit (commonly called “link equity” or “PageRank”) through this link, and in most cases, don’t bother crawling it either. A dofollow link, meaning any link without the attribute, which is the default, passes that credit normally.

Sites add nofollow to links they can’t fully vouch for: blog comments, forum posts, paid placements, widget links, and other spots where anyone could drop a link without editorial review.

Why nofollow exists: a quick history lesson

Google introduced the nofollow attribute in 2005, and the timing matters for understanding why it exists. At the time, comment spam was rampant: spammers were flooding blogs and forums with links purely to manipulate PageRank. Nofollow gave site owners a way to say “yes, this link is here, but I’m not endorsing it and you shouldn’t count it as a vote.”

For roughly 14 years, that was a fairly firm rule. If a link had rel=”nofollow”, Google’s crawlers generally didn’t follow it or count it toward rankings at all.

The 2019 shift: nofollow became a “hint,” not a directive

In September 2019, Google made a change that a lot of the SEO industry is still catching up on. Two things happened at once:

1. Two new attributes were introduced: rel=”sponsored” for paid links, ads, and affiliate placements, and rel=”ugc” for user-generated content like comments and forum posts. These let site owners be more specific about why a link shouldn’t be treated as an endorsement.
2. All three attributes (nofollow, sponsored, and ugc) became “hints” rather than directives. Google’s own language was that it would “generally” treat these the way it always treated nofollow, but that its systems could now choose to use the link anyway, for both crawling and ranking purposes, on a case-by-case basis.

In practical terms: nofollow no longer guarantees a link passes zero value or is never crawled. It signals to Google that you’re not vouching for the destination, and Google mostly still respects that, but it’s no longer an absolute wall.

You can combine attributes where relevant, for example rel=”ugc sponsored” for a paid link inside a comment section. There’s no penalty for using nofollow on links that would technically qualify as sponsored or ugc, though Google recommends the more specific attribute when you know which one applies.

So does a nofollow link help SEO or not?

Here’s the honest, unglamorous answer, broken into what nofollow does and doesn’t do:

What it doesn’t reliably do:

• Pass predictable, direct ranking credit the way a dofollow link does
• Guarantee a bump in rankings just because the link exists
• Work as a substitute for genuine editorial links from relevant, authoritative sites

What it can still do:

• Drive real referral traffic. A nofollow link on a high-traffic page (think Reddit threads, Wikipedia, major news sites, Quora) can send meaningful visitors regardless of what the rel attribute says. Traffic doesn’t care about HTML attributes.
• Get your pages discovered and crawled faster. Because nofollow is now a hint rather than a block, Google may still crawl through nofollow links to find new pages, which can help with indexation speed, particularly for newer sites or pages.
• Build brand signals. Google has talked increasingly about entity recognition and brand mentions as part of how it evaluates authority. A nofollow mention on a reputable site still associates your brand with that context, even without passing link equity in the traditional sense.
• Make your backlink profile look natural. This is the one that trips people up. A site with only dofollow, high-authority backlinks doesn’t look like a normal, organically-earned link profile. It looks manufactured. Real sites accumulate a healthy mix of dofollow and nofollow links naturally, and a profile that’s 100% dofollow can actually raise flags in Google’s spam systems rather than reassure them.
• Warm up future editorial links. In outreach and PR-style link building, a nofollow mention from a respected publication is often the first step. It builds a relationship and a citation trail that frequently leads to a dofollow link, or a direct customer, down the line.

Common nofollow myths, corrected

Myth: “Nofollow links are a complete waste of time to pursue.” Not true. Discounting nofollow opportunities means walking away from real traffic, brand exposure, and profile diversity for the sake of a metric that was never the whole picture to begin with.

Myth: “I should add nofollow to my own internal links to ‘sculpt’ PageRank toward my important pages.” This was a real (if aggressive) tactic in the mid-2000s, sometimes called PageRank sculpting. Google closed that loophole years ago. Nofollowing internal links doesn’t redirect extra credit to your other pages, and it can actually hurt crawl efficiency. There’s no scenario where nofollowing your own internal navigation helps.

Myth: “If a link is nofollow, it can never appear in my backlink profile as a risk.” Nofollow links generally don’t need to be included in a disavow file, since Google already discounts them by default. Save disavow requests for actual spam or manipulative dofollow links, not nofollow ones.

Myth: “Every outbound link I make on my own site should be nofollow, just to be safe.” Google’s own guidance is the opposite: use nofollow selectively, when you don’t trust or can’t vouch for the destination, not as a blanket policy on every external link. Blanket-nofollowing everything you link to, including genuinely useful, relevant resources, provides no SEO benefit and just withholds context from Google unnecessarily.

What this means for your link-building strategy

In practice, the sites that build durable organic visibility don’t chase dofollow links exclusively. They build a link profile that reflects how real websites actually get talked about online, which includes a healthy share of nofollow mentions, especially from high-traffic community and media sites where the referral value alone justifies the effort. A backlink strategy built entirely around forcing dofollow attributes tends to produce a thinner, more suspicious-looking profile than one built around genuine relevance and reach.

If you’re evaluating a guest post, a directory listing, or a PR placement and the only thing giving you pause is “but it’s nofollow,” it’s worth asking a different question first: will this send us real traffic, and does it put our brand in front of the right audience? If the answer is yes, the rel attribute matters a lot less than people think.