A client emailed me a few weeks back, a little deflated. He had spent two months earning a mention on a well-known industry publication, the kind of placement most people would frame and hang on the wall. Then he checked the source code and spotted rel=”nofollow” on the link. His message was basically: so that was a waste of time, right?

I get why he thought that. Somewhere along the way, the SEO world decided nofollow links were the participation trophy of link building. They count for nothing, so why bother. The problem is that this take is about a decade out of date, and it misses where the real value lives.

So let me walk through what a nofollow link actually is, what Google has officially said about them (including a change a lot of people skimmed past), and what I have seen actually work for clients.

What is a nofollow link, exactly?

A nofollow link is a normal hyperlink with one small instruction attached in the HTML: rel=”nofollow”.

By default, every link you place is followed. Google can crawl it and may pass ranking credit to the page you linked to, which is the SEO value often called link juice or link equity passed to the linked page. Adding the nofollow attribute changes the message. It tells search engines, roughly, I am linking here, but do not read this as me vouching for the page.

If you want to check whether a link is nofollow, right-click it, choose Inspect, and look at the anchor tag, though plugins like Rank Math can also add the nofollow attribute without editing HTML manually. If you see rel=”nofollow” (or its newer cousins, which I will get to), it is a nofollow link. If there is no rel attribute at all, it is a regular followed link. For example: <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Example</a>.

That is the whole mechanism. One attribute. The interesting part is how search engines handle this nofollow link attribute for ranking purposes.

What Google actually says about nofollow

Here is the history in two minutes, because it explains everything.

Google introduced rel=”nofollow” back in 2005 to combat comment spam. At the time, spammers were dumping links into blog comments and other spammy comments to manipulate rankings, and nofollow gave site owners a way to say do not count these. For about 14 years, that is exactly how it worked. A nofollow link was a hard directive, and Google ignored it for ranking. Full stop.

Then in September 2019, Google changed how it treats nofollow links, and this is the part most nofollow-is-worthless articles never updated for. Google announced that nofollow would be treated as a hint rather than a strict directive, and it added two new link attributes alongside it in 2019:

  • rel=”sponsored” for paid links, ads, and affiliate placements; use nofollow for paid links to comply with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, mark sponsored links clearly, and avoid issues tied to paid link schemes or a Google penalty
  • rel=”ugc” for user-generated content like comments and forum posts

In Google’s own words, all three attributes are now treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. From March 1, 2020, nofollow also became a hint for crawling and indexing, not just ranking.

Now, before anyone gets excited: hint does not mean nofollow links suddenly pass authority the way a clean editorial link does. Google’s Danny Sullivan was quick to shoot down that reading. The change means Google reserves the right to look at nofollow links as one signal among many, mostly so it can understand the web’s link patterns better. It does not mean your pile of nofollow profile links is quietly boosting your rankings.

One more thing worth knowing: Google has said there is no need to go back and change the nofollow links you already have, and you will not get penalized for using plain nofollow instead of the newer tags. Other search engines may interpret link attributes differently, but Google’s stance is still the one most SEOs prioritize. So do not lose a weekend retrofitting old links.

So do nofollow links have SEO value or not?

Here is my honest answer, and it depends on what you mean by help.

If you are asking whether a nofollow link will directly lift your rankings the way a strong dofollow link does, the answer is probably not, at least not in any way you can measure. Google says it might consider them, and much of the seo community believes nofollow backlinks can influence search engine rankings in some cases. In practice, nobody has shown a reliable, repeatable ranking boost from nofollow links, and I would not build a strategy expecting one. Even so, 89.1% of SEO experts believe nofollow links influence rankings, which is a belief rather than proof.

But does it help my rankings directly is the wrong question, especially if your seo goals involve broader visibility and overall seo impact. It is like asking whether a billboard helps your sales. Not in a way you can trace to a single line on a spreadsheet, but that does not mean it is doing nothing. Here is where nofollow links pass indirect benefits and actually earn their keep in terms of seo value.

They send you real traffic

A nofollow link still works like a link. Someone clicks it and lands on your site, bringing real traffic and referral traffic. A mention on a high-traffic publication can send more qualified visitors in a week than a dozen dofollow links from sleepy blogs send in a year, boosting website traffic even when the link does not pass PageRank directly. That traffic does not care about the rel attribute, and neither does your pipeline. Even a nofollow mention in a relevant blog post on a high authority site can drive meaningful visits from one site to another.

They make your link profile look normal

This one matters more than people think. Look at any established site’s backlinks and a big chunk of them are nofollow, because Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and basically every social platform apply nofollow by default, unlike dofollow and nofollow links in a balanced backlink profile. That is simply what a natural link profile looks like. A backlink profile that is one hundred percent pristine dofollow links is not impressive to Google. It is suspicious. It is one of the patterns that hints someone has been buying or manufacturing links, the same unnatural footprint you worry about with toxic backlinks. A healthy mix looks earned, because earned links are a mix, and that diversity supports a site’s authority and website’s authority over time as part of a sound seo strategy built on follow links and a natural backlink profile.

They open the door to better links

Plenty of relationships start with a nofollow mention and later lead to dofollow backlinks that pass SEO value. A blogger references you, an editor quotes you, a journalist links to your data with a nofollow attribute, and those mentions from other websites can become part of a broader digital PR or link building strategy. That first placement puts you on their radar. Do good work, stay useful, and the next placement, or the one after that, is often a followed editorial link. I have watched a single nofollow mention turn into an ongoing relationship that produced exactly the kind of links we were actually after to build ranking power and domain authority.

They appear to matter for AI search

This is the newest reason, and it is the one I would pay attention to going forward, especially for visibility in search results and search engine results pages, not just classic organic rankings. A 2025 Semrush study that analyzed 1,000 domains found that nofollow links had nearly the same correlation with AI visibility as dofollow links. In other words, when tools like ChatGPT and Gemini decide which brands to mention, a nofollow citation from a trusted source, including mentions tied to authoritative external links, seems to count for roughly as much as a followed one. The study even found Gemini and ChatGPT leaning slightly toward nofollow links. That is correlation, not proof of cause, and AI search is changing fast. But it lines up with something that has always been true: getting mentioned by a credible source matters, whatever attribute is attached to the link, which is useful for website owners planning broader seo efforts beyond traditional blue-link rankings.

When to use the nofollow attribute on your own outbound links

Quick practical note, since this trips people up: the right rel settings should support your site structure rather than be applied indiscriminately to internal links. You do not need to nofollow every external link you place. Internal links are usually better left followed so they can distribute ranking power and link equity across the site. Followed links to genuinely good sources are normal and fine. Reach for the rel attributes in these cases:

  • Use rel=”sponsored” for anything paid: ads, affiliate links, sponsored placements. This is where you should use nofollow links or sponsored on paid links to avoid a google penalty and stay aligned with google’s webmaster guidelines.
  • Use rel=”ugc” for links your users add, like comments and forum posts.
  • Use rel=”nofollow” when you want to reference a page without implying you endorse it.

That is generally better than blanket nofollowing everything, because you are telling google what kind of link you are using.

If you only ever use plain nofollow for all of the above, you are fine. Google treats them the same way for this purpose. The newer tags just hand it cleaner information. There are edge cases where you may nofollow internal pages like login screens or low-value utility URLs, but not as a default.

What I actually tell clients

When a client asks whether they should care about a nofollow placement, my answer is almost always the same: care about the site, not the attribute, and make sure the mix supports your broader seo strategy and seo goals.

A nofollow link from a relevant, high-traffic publication your buyers actually read is worth chasing. A link from a high authority site can still support domain authority and a website’s authority, even when it is nofollow. A dofollow link from a spammy directory that exists only to sell links is worth nothing, and might even cause problems. The follow or nofollow tag is one of the least important things on that list. Relevance, traffic, and trust come first. That is why our link building is not built around hunting for dofollow tags or only building links for ranking credit; it is also about referral traffic and a natural backlink profile. It is built around earning placements on sites that matter, through real outreach and the kind of guest posting that gets accepted because the content is genuinely good.

So the next time you earn a great mention and spot rel=”nofollow” in the code, do not deflate like my client did. Ask the better question: is this the kind of site I want my name on? If the answer is yes, the attribute is a footnote.