Do Nofollow Links Help SEO? What Google Says

Sometimes, but not in the way the question assumes. Google has treated nofollow as a hint rather than a rule since March 2020, so a nofollow link is not automatically ignored and not automatically valuable either. The dependable returns from a nofollow link are the ones that never depended on the attribute: referral traffic, brand exposure, and the editorial links that follow when people find you.

The reason this question keeps getting asked is that the honest answer changed and most advice did not. A lot of what circulates still describes rules Google retired years ago, which is how you end up with people declining a mention on a major publication because the link would be nofollow.

What Google actually changed

Nofollow arrived in 2005 with one job: make comment spam pointless. If search engines would not follow a nofollow link, dumping your URL into a comment section stopped paying. For about fourteen years that was an instruction, and the SEO world built a lot of tactics on it being one.

In September 2019 Google announced two things. First, two new values: rel="sponsored" for advertisements and paid placements, and rel="ugc" for user generated content like comments and forum posts. Second, and more importantly, that all three attributes would work as hints to incorporate for ranking purposes, and that nofollow would become a hint for crawling and indexing purposes as of March 1, 2020.

A hint is not a rule. It means Google reserves the right to use the information rather than being bound by it. Googlebot may follow a nofollow link, reach the page and index it. What it does not mean is that nofollow links now pass ranking value by default, which is the standard overcorrection. Both extremes are wrong: nofollow links are neither worthless nor equivalent to a normal link.

Are nofollow links good for SEO?

Treat them as good for your business first and possibly good for rankings second. That ordering is not a hedge, it is the only version anyone can act on, because Google has never said how or when it uses the hint and nobody outside Google can measure it.

What you can measure is everything else a link does. A nofollow link from a publication your buyers read sends people to your site who would not otherwise have arrived. Those people convert, or they mention you, or they link to you later from their own site without an attribute on it. A link on a high traffic community page can be worth more in a week than a dozen dofollow links from sites nobody visits.

There is also a natural profile argument. A backlink profile made entirely of followed links from sites that link to nothing else is not what a normally cited business looks like. Real companies accumulate nofollow links constantly, from press coverage, directories, social profiles, forums and comment threads, and that mix is the baseline, not a dilution of it.

Where nofollow links genuinely pay off

The clearest case is coverage. When a trade publication, a newsletter or a busy subreddit points at you, the attribute on that link is the least interesting thing about it. The traffic is real, the audience is qualified, and the mention is what other writers find when they go looking for a source.

That second-order effect is where most of the value sits, and it is worth tracking rather than guessing at. Knowing where your brand is being mentioned across the web tells you which nofollow placements are actually driving conversation, and it surfaces the mentions that never linked to you at all, which are usually the cheapest links available to anyone willing to send a polite email.

Directory and profile links fall into the same bucket. They will almost always be nofollow, they will almost never move a ranking on their own, and they still belong on the list because they are how a lot of buyers and a lot of AI assistants verify that a company exists.

Should you nofollow your own internal links?

Almost never, and the reason is the 2020 change again. Once nofollow became a hint, using it to route Googlebot around your own site stopped being reliable by design.

The tactic it usually descends from is PageRank sculpting: nofollowing internal links to unimportant pages so more value flowed to important ones. Google closed that in 2009, when Matt Cutts explained that the value allocated to a nofollowed link evaporates instead of being handed to the remaining links. Sculpting stopped being clever and started being a way to discard ranking value, and it has been that way for over fifteen years. If you find nofollow scattered through a site's navigation today, it is nearly always a fossil worth removing.

The pages people are usually trying to suppress need a different control anyway. Login screens, cart steps, filtered listings and internal search results should carry a noindex rule on the page itself, and that page has to stay crawlable for the rule to be read. Nofollowing the links pointing at them does not keep them out of Google, which brings us to the part that costs sites real pages.

Do nofollow links get indexed?

Yes, they can, and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding in this topic. Google's documentation says that links marked with these attributes will generally not be followed, but that the linked pages may still be found through other means, such as sitemaps or links from other sites, and so they may still be crawled.

Nofollow closes one discovery route. It does not close the rest, and it makes no claim about indexing at all. A URL you nofollowed everywhere on your own site can still appear in search results because your sitemap listed it, because another site linked to it, or because a redirect pointed at it.

The control that actually works lives on the destination, not on the link. Google's instruction is to allow crawling and use the noindex rule, and the first half is the half people drop. Block the URL in robots.txt and the crawler never reads the noindex, so the page can keep appearing in search results indefinitely. The full breakdown of which control does which job is on our guide to nofollow links, dofollow links and rel=nofollow.

What about dofollow links?

There is no such attribute. rel="dofollow" has never existed in any specification, Google has never supported it, and writing it into a link does nothing. A dofollow link is just a link with no rel attribute at all.

Worth knowing when someone offers to sell you dofollow backlinks, because the product being described is an ordinary HTML anchor. The attribute is not the valuable part. Whether the page carrying the link is one Google crawls, and whether that site has any standing, is the entire question, and a link on a page Google has never indexed does nothing for you regardless of what its markup says.

How to check what you actually have

Most sites do not know what their own links say, because themes, plugins and comment systems add rel values without announcing it. A very common default is nofollow on every external link, which quietly strips the attribute-free citations you meant to give your sources.

• View source on a live page and search for rel= to see what is really being served, not what the editor shows you.
• Check that paid placements and affiliate links carry sponsored, since links with no attribute are the pattern Google treats as a link scheme.
• Check that comments and profile fields carry ugc, which most platforms handle automatically once configured.
• For any URL you want out of search results, check both the meta robots tag and the X-Robots-Tag header, and confirm robots.txt is not blocking it.
• Then check whether the URL is indexed, which is the only real proof that any of it worked.

That last step is the one that gets skipped. Whether a directive did its job is a question about the index, not about your markup, and the gap between the two is usually where the surprise lives. Pointing links at pages that deserve them is the other half of the same job, which is covered in our guide to internal linking and how Google discovers URLs.

The short version

Chase links you would want if search engines did not exist. A nofollow link from a place your buyers actually read beats a followed link from a site with no audience, every time, and it always did. Google's hint model just made that the official position rather than the contrarian one.

Where nofollow genuinely matters is disclosure and control. Use sponsored on anything paid, use ugc on anything visitors submit, and stop using nofollow as an indexing control, because it has never been one.