Do Nofollow Links Help SEO? Here Is What My Client Data Shows

Do nofollow links help SEO? Yes, but not the way a followed link does, and anyone who answers that question with a flat yes or no is usually selling you something. I have built links for clients since 2019, and this comes up in nearly every kickoff call, normally about ten minutes after the client notices that the guest post they paid for came back with rel=”nofollow” sitting in the code.

So here is the short version, then the numbers I pulled out of three client campaigns I ran between 2024 and the middle of 2026. Real sessions, real signups, real ranking movement, not theory.

The short answer: do nofollow links help SEO, just not on the scoreboard

Split the question into three separate things and it stops being confusing:

• Ranking credit: a nofollow link is not something you should ever budget for. Google calls the attribute a hint, which means it can decide to count the link, and it can decide to throw it away. You have no way of knowing which happened, so plan as if it passes nothing.
• Traffic: this is the part people skip. A nofollow link on a page that 4,000 people read every month is worth more to a business than a followed link on a dead blog nobody visits.
• How your profile looks: a backlink profile that is 100 percent followed is not a natural profile. Real brands get mentioned on Reddit, in press pieces and in comment sections, and almost all of those are nofollow.

My working rule after seven years: never pay a premium for a nofollow link, never refuse one that comes with an audience.

What the 2019 change actually did

For fifteen years rel=”nofollow” was a directive. Google saw it and dropped the link, end of story. In September 2019 that changed. Google introduced two extra attributes and said all three would be treated as hints for ranking purposes from March 2020 onward. The current wording sits on Google Search Central, and it is worth five minutes of your time.

All of this is about links from other sites. Tagged links between your own pages are a different problem, and I cover when to remove nofollow internal links in a separate post.

Here is the practical bit. Because these are hints now, a nofollow link from a site Google trusts is not automatically worthless. I have watched pages pick up movement after a run of nofollow press mentions with nothing else changing. I cannot prove causation on a single site, which is exactly why I stopped promising clients anything on this and started measuring traffic instead.

Do nofollow links help SEO in practice? Three client campaigns

These are campaigns where nofollow links made up most or all of what we earned, tracked over 90 days each. Client names are out of it, but the numbers come straight from GA4 and their own signup dashboards.

Look at the second row. Nearly 1,900 sessions and 41 leads from links that pass no ranking credit at all. That client did not care about the two positions. They cared about the 41 people asking for a quote. Now look at the third row: nine decent mentions, barely any traffic, no movement. Same tactic, different audience, completely different outcome.

That gap is the whole answer. Do nofollow links help SEO campaigns? They pay when the page they sit on has readers. When it does not, you have spent a week of outreach on one line of HTML.

Where nofollow links are worth chasing

• Journalist and press mentions. Most news sites mark outbound links nofollow or sponsored now. I still chase them, because a single feature can send a few hundred qualified readers, and because other blogs quote news pieces and those secondary links are often followed. My process is in my post on HARO link building.
• Big communities. Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, industry Slack archives, niche forums. All ugc or nofollow, all capable of sending traffic for years. The home services client above got most of those 1,840 sessions from four Reddit threads.
• Podcast pages and newsletter archives. Low volume, high intent. Six demo requests off nine mentions beats most paid channels on conversion rate.
• Tool directories and marketplaces. G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, app marketplaces. Nofollow, but buyers actually shop there.
• Anything your competitors already have. If three competitors are listed somewhere and you are not, that placement is doing something for them. Pull it up in a backlink gap analysis and decide on evidence rather than on the rel attribute.

When I walk away from a nofollow link

• Anyone asking for money for a nofollow guest post. If it is paid and marked, you are buying an ad, so price it like an ad and check the traffic first. The pricing side of this is in my guide on buying backlinks.
• Blog comment links. Dead since roughly 2013. The only comments worth leaving are the ones you would leave anyway, signed with your name, not a keyword.
• Profile links on sites nobody reads. Twenty minutes each, zero return, and they sit on pages Google rarely crawls twice.
• Directories that exist only to sell listings. If the site has no organic traffic of its own, the listing has no readers either.

The ratio question, and why nobody has a magic number

Clients ask what percentage of their profile should be nofollow. There is no published threshold, and anyone quoting one invented it. What I do instead is compare. I pull the followed versus nofollow split for the three sites currently outranking my client, and if my client sits far outside that range in either direction, I change what we chase next quarter.

Across the sites I have audited, the profiles that look most natural land somewhere between 20 and 40 percent nofollow. A site at 2 percent usually means every link was bought or placed. A site at 80 percent usually means nobody has done any real outreach. Neither is a penalty on its own, but both tell a story to anyone reading the profile.

The same logic applies to anchors. Nofollow links tend to carry brand or naked URL anchors, which quietly balances the exact match anchors you picked up elsewhere. To see your own split, run your anchors through my free anchor text ratio checker, then read anchor text over optimization if the score comes back ugly.

Four mistakes I keep seeing

• Auditing links by attribute alone. Someone exports the profile, sorts by followed, deletes the rest from the report. They just hid the links sending actual customers.
• Paying guest post rates for sponsored placements. Check the rel attribute on the site’s existing outbound links before you agree a price, not after the invoice lands.
• Nofollowing their own outbound links. Linking out to good sources drains nothing from you. Adding nofollow to every external link makes a page look stingy and does not help its rankings. Ahrefs ran the numbers on this in their study on nofollow links.
• Disavowing nofollow links. I have opened disavow files full of them. Google already discounts these, and Search Central is clear that the disavow tool is for a narrow set of cases most sites never hit.

If you are not sure which of your links are nofollow, the walkthrough on how to check backlinks shows where each tool displays the rel attribute.

My 60 second test before chasing one

1. Does the page get organic traffic? If the answer is no, stop here.
2. Would my client’s buyer plausibly be reading that page? A developer forum is useless for a dentist.
3. Is the link editorial or bolted into a footer? Footers and author bios convert badly. In-content mentions convert, which is the same reason I push for contextual backlinks wherever I can get them.
4. How much of my week does it cost? Anything over two hours has to justify itself on traffic alone.
5. Will it still be there in a year? Forum threads and press archives last. Sidebar listings get cleared out.

Three yeses and I go after it. Two or fewer and the time goes into a followed link instead.

If you take one thing away, make it this: stop sorting links by rel attribute and start sorting them by whether a human being will ever see them. That single change fixed reporting for two of my clients last year, because it turned a link count nobody cared about into a traffic number the founder could act on. So, do nofollow links help SEO in the narrow ranking sense? Sometimes, unpredictably, and never on schedule. Do they help a business? Often, and that is the number I would rather put in a report.