Do Nofollow Links Help SEO? Here’s What Actually Matters

If you’ve spent any time in an SEO Facebook group or a link building Slack channel, you’ve probably seen someone dismiss a link the second they find out it’s nofollow. “Don’t bother, it’s nofollow, it won’t move the needle.” It’s one of the most repeated pieces of SEO advice out there, and it’s also one of the most outdated.

So, do nofollow links help SEO? The short answer is yes, just not in the way most people expect. Nofollow links won’t hand your page a direct ranking boost the way a strong dofollow link can, but they do real work behind the scenes: sending traffic, building trust signals, and shaping a backlink profile that looks like it belongs to a real, actively discussed business rather than a site that paid its way to the top.

Let’s break down what nofollow links actually are, how Google treats them today, and where they fit into a SaaS link building strategy that’s built for both traditional search and the AI search engines your buyers are starting to use instead of Google.

Key Takeaways

• Nofollow links can support SEO by driving referral traffic, strengthening brand trust, and contributing to a natural backlink profile, even if they don’t pass traditional link equity.
• Since 2020, Google has treated nofollow links as a hint rather than a strict directive, allowing them to influence crawling and contextual understanding.
• AI search engines value brand mentions and citations across the web, making nofollow links more valuable for AI visibility than many marketers realize.
• The strongest SEO strategy combines authoritative dofollow backlinks with high-quality nofollow mentions to build credibility, traffic, and long-term search performance.
• SaaS companies should prioritize earning links from relevant, trusted websites instead of focusing exclusively on whether a link is dofollow or nofollow.
• Queen of Clicks helps SaaS brands build balanced, AI-ready link-building strategies that increase authority, drive organic growth, and improve visibility across both Google and AI search engines.

What Is A Nofollow Link, Exactly

A nofollow link is a hyperlink with a small piece of code attached to it: rel=”nofollow”. That code tells search engine crawlers not to pass link equity, sometimes called “link juice,” from the linking page to the page it points to.

Google introduced the nofollow attribute back in 2005, and the reason was pretty simple. Blog comment sections and forums were getting flooded with spam links, because at the time, any link counted toward your rankings. Site owners needed a way to say “I’m linking to this, but I’m not vouching for it,” and nofollow gave them that option.

Fast forward to today, and nofollow links show up everywhere: news sites, social media posts, comment sections, sponsored content, Wikipedia, and plenty of guest post placements too.

The Difference Between Nofollow, Sponsored, And UGC Tags

In 2019, Google split the nofollow attribute into three separate tags to give site owners more precise ways to label their links:

• rel=”nofollow” for general links you don’t want to endorse
• rel=”sponsored” for paid links, ads, or affiliate placements
• rel=”ugc” for user-generated content, like comments and forum posts

This matters because it changed how Google treats these links internally. All three are still nofollow in practice, but the extra detail helps Google’s algorithms understand why a link exists, which plays into how much weight it gets.

So, Do Nofollow Links Help SEO

Here’s where the nuance comes in. Since March 2020, Google no longer treats nofollow as a strict command to ignore a link. Instead, it treats it as a hint. Google can still choose to crawl the linked page, index it, and in some cases factor the link into its understanding of how the web connects, even if it doesn’t pass full ranking authority.

That shift alone should have put the “nofollow is worthless” advice to rest, but old habits are hard to break in SEO.

How Google Actually Treats Nofollow Links Today

In practice, most nofollow links still won’t directly push your rankings up the way an editorial dofollow link from a relevant, authoritative site will. But Google’s own guidance confirms it can use nofollow links as a signal when it’s trying to discover new content or understand the broader context around a brand. If enough reputable sites are linking to you, even without passing link equity, that’s a pattern Google notices.

Why The Old “Nofollow Is Worthless” Advice Is Outdated

The advice to ignore nofollow links entirely came from a time when SEO was mostly about manipulating a single ranking factor: PageRank. Search has moved well past that. Google now looks at brand signals, user behavior, topical authority, and increasingly, how often a brand gets mentioned and cited across the web, including in places that only ever offer nofollow links.

Treating every nofollow opportunity as a waste of time means walking away from press mentions, product roundups, and community discussions that build the exact kind of authority modern search rewards.

The Real Benefits Of Nofollow Links For SEO

Nofollow links earn their keep in ways that don’t show up on a rank tracker but absolutely show up in your growth numbers.

Referral Traffic That Converts

A nofollow link from a popular SaaS newsletter, a Reddit thread, or a G2 review can send real, qualified visitors to your site. Unlike a dofollow link buried in a low-traffic directory, a nofollow mention from a site your buyers actually read can outperform a “stronger” link on paper.

Brand Visibility And Trust Signals

Every time your brand gets mentioned, linked or not, it reinforces that you exist and that you’re worth talking about. Search engines increasingly look at these mentions as part of a broader trust signal, especially for newer SaaS brands trying to establish authority in a crowded category.

A More Natural Backlink Profile

A site with nothing but perfectly optimized dofollow anchor text links looks suspicious to Google. Real businesses get mentioned in comment sections, cited in forums, and linked to from social posts, and almost all of those are nofollow by default. Having a healthy mix of both link types is exactly what a naturally earned, non-manipulated profile looks like.

Nofollow Links And AI Search Visibility

This is the part most SEO advice from a few years ago completely missed. AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews don’t pull citations the way traditional Google crawling does. They’re looking for brand mentions, consistent information, and content that clearly answers a question, and the link attribute attached to a mention often has little bearing on whether it gets used as a source.

A recent survey of over 500 SEO professionals found that 54% believe nofollow links can still improve authority and search engine rankings, and that number keeps climbing as more marketers see the connection between nofollow mentions and AI citations play out in their own data. If you want to understand how this shift specifically affects SaaS brands trying to get cited by AI search engines, it’s worth digging into how citation-based discovery actually works, because it plays by a different set of rules than classic Google rankings.

When Nofollow Links Are Not Enough

None of this means you should stop chasing dofollow links. If nofollow links built your entire backlink profile, you’d be missing out on the direct authority transfer that still plays a meaningful role in how Google ranks pages, especially for competitive, high-intent keywords where your SaaS product actually needs to outrank established players.

The goal isn’t to pick a side. It’s to build a profile where dofollow links do the heavy lifting on authority, while nofollow links round things out with traffic, visibility, and the kind of natural diversity that makes your whole link profile believable.

How To Build A Balanced Link Profile For Your SaaS Site

A few practical habits go a long way here:

• Prioritize dofollow placements from sites that are genuinely relevant to your product or industry, not just high domain authority for its own sake.
• Don’t turn down nofollow opportunities from high-traffic or high-trust sources like review platforms, industry newsletters, or well-read forums.
• Keep your anchor text natural across both link types instead of stuffing exact-match keywords everywhere.
• Audit your backlink profile regularly to check the ratio between dofollow and nofollow links and make sure nothing looks manipulated.
• Make sure your own SEO for SaaS strategy accounts for both link types instead of chasing one metric in isolation.

If you’re trying to figure out where your current link profile stands, or whether the mix you have is actually helping, running the numbers through a tool like our SaaS SEO ROI calculator can give you a clearer picture of where your organic growth is really coming from.

For SaaS brands specifically, it also helps to think beyond individual keywords and toward the bigger picture of how your product gets discovered. Understanding concepts like entity-based SEO for LLMs and how agentic search tools research and shortlist software on a buyer’s behalf will tell you a lot more about where to spend your link building energy than a strict dofollow-only checklist ever will.

🚀  Get Found By Buyers And AI Search Engines Alike with Queen of Clicks

If you’re a SaaS company trying to figure out where nofollow links, dofollow links, and AI citations all fit into one coherent strategy, that’s exactly the kind of work we do every day at Queen of Clicks. 

We build link profiles and content strategies that don’t just chase rankings on Google, they help your brand get cited by name inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, where more and more of your buyers are starting their research. If that sounds like the kind of growth your SaaS business is missing right now, get in touch with our team and let’s talk about what a balanced, AI-ready SEO strategy could look like for you.

Conclusion

Nofollow links won’t replace a strong dofollow backlink strategy, and anyone telling you otherwise is oversimplifying things. But dismissing nofollow links outright means ignoring referral traffic, brand trust signals, a more natural link profile, and a growing role in how AI search tools decide who to cite. The smartest approach isn’t dofollow versus nofollow. It’s building a link profile that reflects how a genuinely trusted, widely talked-about SaaS brand actually looks across the web, because that’s the profile both Google and AI search engines are learning to reward.

FAQs

Does Google penalize websites for having too many nofollow links? 

No. Google doesn’t penalize a site for having nofollow links pointing to it. A backlink profile made up entirely of dofollow links is actually more likely to raise red flags, since it doesn’t match how real websites naturally get linked to across forums, social platforms, and news mentions.

Should I add nofollow tags to the outbound links on my own website? 

It depends on the type of link. Paid placements and affiliate links should carry a sponsored or nofollow tag to stay compliant with Google’s guidelines. Editorial links to genuinely useful resources can usually stay dofollow, since passing a bit of authority to a trustworthy source doesn’t hurt your own site.

Do nofollow links from social media platforms help SEO? 

Social platforms like LinkedIn, X, and Facebook use nofollow links by default, so they won’t pass link equity. They can still drive referral traffic, increase brand visibility, and lead to journalists or bloggers discovering your content and linking to it later with a followed link.

Can a nofollow link ever turn into a dofollow link? 

Not automatically, since the attribute is set in the HTML by whoever owns the page. What can happen is that a nofollow mention gets picked up by someone else, like a journalist or blogger, who then writes about it and links to you with a dofollow link instead.

How can I check whether a specific backlink is nofollow or dofollow? 

You can right-click the link and inspect the HTML to look for the rel attribute, or use an SEO tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz, which label each backlink in your profile as dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, or UGC automatically.

Do the internal links on my own website need to be dofollow? 

Yes, in almost every case. Internal links help search engines crawl and understand the structure of your site, and adding nofollow to internal links can actually block that flow of authority between your own pages, which usually does more harm than good.

Is guest posting still worth it if the link comes back as nofollow? 

Yes, especially on sites with an engaged, relevant audience. A nofollow guest post on a site your ideal customers actually read can bring in referral traffic, brand exposure, and credibility, even without passing direct link equity to your domain.