Are Nofollow Links Any Good for SEO

Intro

Websites can use the HTML tag rel=”nofollow” to instruct search engines not to credit a link with any importance for the purposes of search engine optimization. Many sites, including many of the most important sites on the internet, do this by default, making the tag of questionable value if you are a search engine crawler. Therefore, many search engines make their own decisions on whether or not to respect these tags, and they generally do not.

Therefore, if you can place contextually relevant backlinks on websites that tag links with rel=“nofollow”, do it. Don’t let the nofollow tag discourage you.

A Primer on the History of Relationship Tags

Relationship tags provide context on the relationship between the linked page and the linking page. Some common ones which are meaningful to marketers include rel=”ugc” which denotes user-generated content and rel=”sponsored” which denotes sponsored content. Today, there are over 100 link relations recognized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Most of them are arcane and not used by search engines in any way which would be meaningful to marketers.

Nofollow links were established in the first iteration of the link relationship attribute (AKA “rel” tags) back in 2005, and was proposed by Google’s Matt Cutts and Blogger’s Jason Shellen. These came into being such that webmasters could indicate to search engines what the purpose of any given link was. This was done primarily to fight link spam, which was pervasive at the time.

Search engines were much more primitive in the mid-2000s. For a long time, search engines treated relationship tags, including nofollow tags, as law. A nofollow tag would prevent any SEO benefit from being given to the site or page which was being linked to. Additionally, many search engines wouldn’t even index the link!

The Evolution of Nofollow

Over time, website moderation technologies and best practices improved to the point where website spam was far less of an issue. These days, it’s fairly rare to see spam on high-quality sites like Wikipedia or Reddit. Most forums are fairly well self-policing, most blogs have effective anti-spam tools, and even when they fail, modern search engines are capable of telling what is and isn’t spam based on context and other factors. Rel tags, or at least nofollow tags, are simply not necessary.

Google’s Danny Sullivan and Gary Illyes announced as much in a September 2019 blog post:

When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal to use within our search algorithms. This has now changed. All the link attributes—sponsored, ugc, and nofollow—are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. We’ll use these hints—along with other signals—as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.

Why not completely ignore such links, as had been the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.

With that announcement, Google said explicitly that as of the March 1, 2020 update rel=“nofollow” would be treated as a hint rather than a rule.

How to Get Value from Nofollow Links

How can you post nofollow links that actually provide SEO value? There are three rules:

1. Mind the Context
2. Provide Value
3. Be Natural

Mind the Context. Your post, comment, or whatever other content you are placing on a website should fit the site, the page, and the conversation. If you are talking about something that is not relevant, search engines will know and they will abide by that nofollow tag.

Provide Value. The best way of ensuring that you follow the context is to post something that adds value to the place you are posting it. Have you contributed meaningfully to the conversation, or are you being spammy? If you are being spammy, the search engines will sense it and not give you any link juice. Think of link building using nofollow links like you would think of content marketing: you won’t get any value unless you provide some value.

Be Natural. Write naturally. Use links naturally. Don’t force it. Write like a human. Provide additional context with your link: don’t just drop a link. The more natural you are, the more likely you are to convince the search engines to ignore the nofollow.

Real-World Impact: A Case Study

Link building using nofollow links can have a measurable and demonstrable impact on SEO. BioBM, a life science marketing agency, shows off some impressive results in this case study on using nofollow backlinks for SEO.

Starting in August 2023, BioBM started doing a significant quantity of link building for one of their clients, Laboratory Supply Network. This effort relied heavily on links from Reddit and Quora, both of which tag all community links with nofollow. Over a span of a year, they improved the client’s average rank by a full 10 positions, improved their median rank from 14 to 4, and increased top 3 from 21% to almost 50%. This demonstrates that nofollow links can have a substantial impact on SEO.

Summary

Banklinking is an integral part of any holistic SEO strategy; as much so as keyword research or other fundamentals. While Google and other search engines have changed the ways in which they attribute value to links, it is highly unlikely that they will ever be discounted completely. The best and most future-proof strategy to derive value from links will always be to use them naturally, in contextually relevant situations, while providing value and avoiding being spammy.