What Is a Nofollow Link? Definition and Why It Matters

A nofollow link carries rel=”nofollow” in its HTML. Introduced by Google in 2005, it’s a way for a site to say “we’re linking to this, but we don’t want to personally vouch for it as an endorsement.” Since 2019, Google treats nofollow as a hint it may or may not follow, rather than a strict instruction it always obeys.

Where nofollow shows up

• Comment sections, forums and other places anyone can post a link.
• Paid links and sponsorships, often paired with rel=”sponsored”.
• User-submitted content, sometimes tagged rel=”ugc” instead.
• Widgets, badges and untrusted embedded content a site doesn’t want to fully endorse.

Does a nofollow link still do anything?

Yes, just not the same job as a followed link. A nofollow link can still:

Benefit	Why it happens regardless of the attribute
Referral traffic	Readers click links whether or not they’re marked nofollow.
Brand exposure	Being mentioned on a relevant, trusted site builds recognition.
A natural link profile	Real sites earn a healthy mix of both types; an all-followed profile can look manufactured (common link building myths).
Possible ranking consideration	As a hint rather than a rule, Google may still weigh some nofollow links in certain contexts.

How it compares to dofollow

The two terms are opposites by definition — see what a dofollow link is for the flip side. Neither is inherently good or bad; each fits different placements. A press mention picked up from a wire release will often be nofollow; a genuinely earned editorial reference in an article is more often followed.

Common mistakes

• Dismissing an entire opportunity because the link would be nofollow, even when the audience and traffic are strong.
• Assuming nofollow links have zero effect on rankings, when Google describes them as a hint it can still use.
• Not qualifying paid links at all, which creates more risk than a properly-marked nofollow ever would (what counts as a link scheme).

A worked example

A startup gets covered in a roundup article on a popular tech news site, and the link is nofollow because the site nofollows all outbound links in that section by policy. The founder is initially disappointed, expecting no SEO benefit — but the piece drives a meaningful spike in direct visits and a handful of other bloggers independently reference the startup afterward, some with followed links. The nofollow mention functioned as a discovery channel rather than a direct ranking lever, which is often exactly its real value.

Building a healthy mix on purpose

Rather than treating nofollow links as a consolation prize, deliberately including some in your outreach targets — forums, roundups, resource mentions that happen to be nofollowed — helps your overall backlink profile look like it belongs to a real, actively-discussed brand rather than one that only ever appears in paid, fully-followed placements. Search engines and manual reviewers alike tend to view an all-followed profile with some suspicion, since almost no genuinely popular site earns links that are exclusively followed.

A simple way to think about the balance

• If nearly all your links are followed and use commercial anchor text, that pattern alone can draw scrutiny.
• A mix that includes branded anchors, generic phrases, nofollow mentions and the occasional bare URL looks like it grew naturally.
• You don’t need to engineer this precisely — it tends to happen on its own if you diversify where you get coverage from.

What to do when a placement’s status is out of your control

Many of the best nofollow opportunities — a mention in a large publication’s comments policy, a listing on a well-run resource directory, a forum thread where your product genuinely helps — aren’t things you can negotiate the attribute on at all; the site’s policy applies uniformly. In those cases, judge the opportunity purely on its own merits: will real people see it, and is it the kind of place your actual audience spends time. The SEO attribute becomes a secondary consideration once you’re looking at genuine audience reach rather than treating every mention as a ranking transaction. Some of the most durable brand awareness gains in link building come from exactly these nofollowed, high-traffic mentions that a purely link-value-focused strategy would otherwise overlook entirely. Over a long enough timeline, a site that only ever chases followed links tends to miss a large share of the genuine visibility opportunities available to it, simply because it filtered them out before ever evaluating the audience behind them. Weighing an opportunity by its actual audience first, and its link attribute second, tends to produce a stronger overall outcome than the reverse. It’s a slower way to build a profile, but it tends to hold up better under scrutiny than one built purely around chasing the followed attribute wherever it can be found.

Where to go next

Compare with dofollow links, read about sponsored and UGC attributes, or explore relevant publishers in the marketplace regardless of link type.

Browse every term in the link building glossary.

Frequently asked questions