Do nofollow links help SEO? Yes—indirectly. They don’t pass PageRank, but they drive traffic, build brand awareness, and diversify your link profile. Learn the truth about nofollow links.
For years I told clients not to bother with nofollow links. “Save your effort for dofollow,” I’d say, pretty confidently, like it was settled science. Then Google quietly reworked how it treats the nofollow attribute back in 2019, and a chunk of what I’d been telling people turned out to be stale advice nobody had bothered updating.
If you’re still working off the old rules here, you’re in good company — most people are. SEO folklore has a habit of freezing in place around 2010 and never getting revisited. So let’s actually dig into this properly. Do nofollow links help SEO? The real answer isn’t a clean yes or no, and I think the nuance is exactly what makes it useful.
First, What Actually Is a Nofollow Link
A nofollow link is just a normal hyperlink with one extra piece of code attached — rel="nofollow". Something like this:
HTML<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example Site</a>
This attribute has been around since 2005, and it came out of Google’s fight against comment spam. People were flooding blog comments with links trying to game rankings, so nofollow gave site owners a way to link out without unintentionally passing SEO credit to whoever they were linking to.
For a long stretch, the rule was dead simple: nofollow links don’t pass PageRank, full stop, search engines mostly ignore them. That was accurate enough for over a decade. It’s just not the whole picture anymore.
The Part Most Articles Skip Over
In September 2019, Google made a change that honestly doesn’t get talked about enough. They rolled out two new attributes — rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for things like forum posts and comments. Nofollow stuck around too, but its role shifted.
Here’s the key bit: Google now treats all three — nofollow, sponsored, ugc — as hints, not hard rules. Their systems can still decide to factor a nofollow link into rankings or crawling if it looks relevant and trustworthy enough.
That changes the whole conversation. Google isn’t saying nofollow links are worthless. They’re saying, more or less, “we’ll make the call ourselves, case by case.” Which, frankly, is a very Google answer — vague on purpose, so nobody can reverse-engineer a loophole.
Myth: Nofollow Links Have No SEO Value Whatsoever
This used to be close to true. It isn’t anymore, and clinging to it is probably costing people real opportunities.
What nofollow links can still do:
- Send genuine, qualified traffic your way, regardless of what the attribute does on Google’s end
- Get your page discovered and crawled faster
- Build brand recognition that adds up over time
- Occasionally contribute some ranking signal, since the attribute is now just a hint
I had a client picked up by a mid-sized industry publication last year — nofollow link, nothing fancy. We weren’t expecting much from it directly. But within a few weeks their branded searches went up noticeably, a handful of smaller blogs picked up the story and linked to them with regular dofollow links, and their overall visibility in Search Console improved. The nofollow link itself probably didn’t move the needle much on its own. But it kicked off a chain reaction that genuinely helped.
This is what gets lost when people ask “do nofollow links help SEO” like it’s a simple switch. Directly? Maybe, a little, depending on what Google decides behind the curtain. Indirectly, through traffic and exposure and the links that follow? Often, yes.
Myth: You Should Avoid Nofollow Opportunities Entirely
I’ve watched marketers pass on guest posts, interviews, even press features — purely because the site defaults to nofollow links. That’s leaving value on the table, and here’s why.
A natural, healthy backlink profile has a mix of both. Google has said this outright — if every single link pointing to your site is dofollow, especially from places where nofollow is the norm (comment sections, forums, social platforms), that actually looks a little off. Too clean can read as manipulated.
Think about how real brands accumulate links naturally. Someone mentions you on Reddit — nofollow. You get cited in a Wikipedia article — nofollow. A news outlet references you in reader comments — nofollow. None of that looks fake. It looks exactly like what happens when a brand is genuinely gaining attention. If your profile is missing that texture, the gap itself can look suspicious.
Myth: Nofollow Links Never Pass Any PageRank
This was stated as fact for years, and it’s a little more complicated than that now. The more accurate version: nofollow links aren’t guaranteed to pass PageRank, but Google has confirmed they sometimes might.
Google deliberately keeps this vague in their documentation, and I get why that annoys SEOs who want a clean formula. But the vagueness is the point — give out a precise rule and people will exploit it within a week. What we do know is their systems weigh nofollow links alongside other signals, and in certain situations — especially around crawling and discovery — these links still shape how Google understands a site’s relevance.
So if someone tells you, with total confidence, that nofollow links “pass zero value, period, end of story” — that’s a few years out of date.
Myth: Sponsored and UGC Links Are Basically Just Nofollow Renamed
Functionally, yes, Google treats all three as hints. But there’s a reason the distinction still matters in practice.
Using the right attribute keeps you in line with Google’s guidelines on paid content and user-generated links. If you’re running affiliate deals or sponsored posts and slap a generic nofollow on them instead of rel=”sponsored,” you’re technically not following best practice — even if the SEO effect ends up looking similar. Google has called this out specifically as part of what keeps a site trustworthy in their eyes.
This matters more than people assume if you’re doing any kind of paid promotion. Getting caught with unlabeled paid links dressed up as organic dofollow links is a far bigger risk than whatever small benefit you’d gain from hiding it.
So — Do Nofollow Links Actually Help SEO?
Let’s just answer it plainly, since that’s what you’re here for.
Nofollow links help SEO indirectly, pretty reliably. They help directly, sometimes, unpredictably.
In practice, that breaks down like this:
They bring in real traffic. A nofollow link sitting on a busy site sends actual humans to your page, and those humans browsing and engaging send their own positive signals to Google — completely separate from the link attribute itself.
They build recognition. Every place your brand shows up, linked or not, nudges Google’s systems a little further toward associating you with authority in that space. People sometimes call this a “brand signal,” and it’s become more relevant as algorithms get better at reading beyond just link structure.
They round out your link profile. A natural mix of nofollow and dofollow is what organic growth actually looks like.
They open doors. Getting a nofollow mention often puts you in front of other publishers who then link to you themselves — sometimes with full dofollow links, no negotiation required.
And every so often, they pass some direct ranking value. Not something you can count on, but it’s been true since 2019 that it’s at least possible.
What they generally won’t do is act like a dependable, flip-the-switch ranking tool the way a strong dofollow link from a relevant site does. If you’re choosing between a nofollow opportunity and an equally good dofollow one, go dofollow. All else equal, it’s still the stronger bet.
Where People Mess This Up
The biggest mistake, in my experience, is treating nofollow and dofollow like a strict useless-versus-valuable binary. That’s not how good SEO strategy works. The goal is to build a presence that looks and behaves the way a genuinely popular, trusted brand naturally would.
Second mistake — obsessing over attribute type while ignoring whether the content is even good enough to earn attention in the first place. I’ve sat in meetings where a team spent two weeks negotiating dofollow terms with a publication, when the real issue was that the content itself wasn’t compelling enough to deserve organic coverage at all. Fix the content, and a lot of these attribute debates sort themselves out.
Third — walking away from nofollow opportunities on huge, high-traffic platforms. A nofollow link from a site pulling in millions of monthly visitors can outperform, in every practical sense, a dofollow link from some low-traffic blog nobody’s ever heard of. Even if Google’s direct ranking credit is minimal.
What I’d Actually Do With This
If you’re shaping a link building strategy right now, here’s how I’d apply all of this in practice.
Don’t skip guest posts, interviews, or press mentions just because the site defaults to nofollow. Judge the opportunity on audience fit and traffic potential first.
Still prioritize dofollow when you have an actual choice, especially from sites relevant to your niche. It remains the more dependable option.
Use the correct attribute for the right situation — nofollow, sponsored, or ugc — particularly for anything paid. It’s a small thing that keeps you compliant and avoids unnecessary risk down the line.
Don’t panic if a chunk of your backlink profile is nofollow. That’s usually a sign of healthy, natural growth, not a problem to fix.
And spend most of your energy on content that’s genuinely worth linking to. Original research, strong opinions backed by real experience, data nobody else has — that’s what earns links, nofollow and dofollow alike, without you ever having to haggle over attributes.
Final Thought
So, do nofollow links help SEO? Yes — indirectly and fairly reliably, and occasionally directly in ways you can’t quite predict. The old “nofollow is worthless” line needs to be retired for good. Google made that clear back in 2019, even if a chunk of the industry hasn’t fully caught up.
The smarter move isn’t picking one link type over the other. It’s building something that naturally earns a healthy mix of both — because that mix is exactly what a real, trusted, well-known site looks like, to readers and search engines alike.
