Almost every explainer frames follow vs nofollow as a binary: follow links pass “link juice” and help you rank, nofollow links are worthless dead ends. That model has been wrong since 2019, and treating it as gospel leads people to chase only follow links, strip nofollow from their own outbound links to hoard equity, and build backlink profiles so lopsided they look engineered. The real mechanism is messier and more useful: nofollow is a hint Google may ignore, “dofollow” isn’t a thing, and a link profile that’s 100% follow is a red flag, not a trophy. Here’s how the attributes actually work now, and how to decide which one to use.
“Dofollow” Isn’t a Real Attribute
Start here because it clears up half the confusion. There is no rel="dofollow" in HTML, and there never was. A “dofollow” link is just a normal link — an anchor tag with no rel value restricting how search engines treat it. The word only exists as shorthand people invented to contrast with nofollow. So when a directory or a marketplace advertises “dofollow backlinks,” they’re describing the default state of any link on the web, which tells you something about how much of that market is noise.
The attribute that actually exists is rel="nofollow", plus its two newer cousins, sponsored and ugc. Everything else — every plain editorial link in an article, every navigation link, every citation — is “follow” by default. Understanding that the default is follow, and nofollow is the deliberate exception, reframes the whole follow vs nofollow question: you’re not choosing to “make a link follow,” you’re choosing whether to add a restriction to it.
What Nofollow Actually Does
Google introduced rel="nofollow" in 2005 to fight blog-comment spam. The original meaning was blunt: don’t follow this link, don’t pass any PageRank through it, don’t let it influence the target’s rankings. If you linked to a site you didn’t trust or didn’t want to vouch for, nofollow was your way of saying “I’m citing this, but I’m not endorsing it.”
For fourteen years that was a strict directive. Google treated a nofollow link as a wall — the crawler wouldn’t traverse it for ranking purposes and no equity moved across it. That’s the model most people still carry in their heads, and it’s the reason so many outdated guides tell you nofollow links do “nothing for SEO.” The behaviour changed in 2019, and the change matters more than the original rule ever did.
The 2019 Shift: From Directive to Hint
In September 2019, Google announced that nofollow would become a hint rather than a directive. Instead of a hard wall, nofollow is now a signal Google may choose to honour or ignore for both crawling and ranking. The reasoning was straightforward: the web had put nofollow on billions of legitimate links (Wikipedia nofollows everything, most large publishers nofollow by default), and throwing away all that information made Google’s understanding of the link graph worse, not better.
So today, a nofollow link might pass signals. Google doesn’t publish which ones it counts, and it won’t tell you when it decides to follow one. This is the single most misunderstood fact in the follow vs nofollow debate: nofollow is no longer a guarantee that a link is inert. It’s a suggestion. That cuts both ways — it means your nofollow backlinks aren’t necessarily worthless, and it means adding nofollow to a paid link isn’t a bulletproof shield if the surrounding context screams “link scheme.”
The Three Link Attributes You Actually Have
Alongside the 2019 change, Google split nofollow into three distinct link attributes so publishers could tell it why a link shouldn’t be fully trusted. All three are hints, not directives:
rel="sponsored"— for paid or advertising links, including affiliate links. If money or free product changed hands for the link, this is the correct tag.rel="ugc"— for user-generated content: forum posts, blog comments, profile links. Anything a third party dropped on your site that you didn’t editorially place.rel="nofollow"— the catch-all for links you don’t want to vouch for that don’t fit the other two, or when you’d rather not categorise.
You can combine them (rel="sponsored nofollow" is valid). Google has said it treats all three roughly the same for ranking purposes today, but the split gives it richer data and gives you a cleaner, more defensible link profile. Using sponsored on affiliate links is the honest, guideline-safe way to disclose that they’re paid — which brings up the risk most people ignore.
Paid Links: Why the Attribute Is Non-Negotiable
Google’s guidelines are explicit that buying or selling links that pass ranking signals is a link scheme. If you accept payment, free product, or any consideration for a link and leave it as a plain follow link, you’re technically in violation, and both the linking and receiving site can be hit with a manual action or algorithmic devaluation. Tagging paid links sponsored (or at minimum nofollow) is what keeps them compliant. This isn’t moralising — it’s the mechanism. The attribute is how you signal “this link was paid for, don’t count it,” which is exactly what protects you when Google’s systems or a human reviewer look closely.
Do Nofollow Links Pass Any Ranking Value?
The honest answer is: sometimes, unpredictably, and you can’t measure it directly. Since nofollow is a hint, Google reserves the right to follow the link and use it. In practice you should never build a strategy assuming a specific nofollow link will pass equity — that’s a coin flip you don’t control. But you also shouldn’t dismiss nofollow links as pure zeroes, because they deliver value through channels that have nothing to do with PageRank:
- Referral traffic — a nofollow link from a high-traffic publisher can send real visitors, which is often worth more than the ranking signal would have been.
- Brand and entity signals — mentions and links help Google associate your brand with a topic, part of how it builds its knowledge of who you are.
- Discovery — Google can still find and crawl your pages through nofollow links even when it discounts them for ranking.
- Profile diversity — which is the point most people miss entirely.
Why a 100% Follow Profile Is a Red Flag
Here’s the counterintuitive part. When links are given naturally, a large share of them come nofollow by default — comments, forum signatures, social profiles, Wikipedia, news sites that nofollow all external links, UGC platforms. A brand that genuinely earns attention accumulates a mix. So a backlink profile that is 95%+ follow, with clean commercial anchor text, is one of the clearer fingerprints of links that were bought or manufactured rather than earned. Google’s link-spam systems are tuned to notice exactly that kind of unnatural pattern.
This flips the usual anxiety on its head. People worry their nofollow backlinks are “wasted.” In reality those nofollow links are camouflage and credibility — they make the whole profile look like what it should look like. Chasing an all-follow profile to maximise equity is how you build something that reads as engineered. In the follow vs nofollow calculus, the nofollow half is doing quiet, real work.
Stop Nofollowing Your Internal Links (PageRank Sculpting Is Dead)
An old tactic called PageRank sculpting used nofollow on internal links — pointing it at low-value pages like login or cart so more equity would flow to money pages. Google killed this in 2009. The key detail: a nofollow link still consumes its share of a page’s PageRank; the equity just evaporates instead of flowing anywhere. So nofollowing an internal link doesn’t redirect that value to your other links — it destroys it. In 2026 there is essentially no good reason to nofollow your own internal links. Let them all be plain follow links and let equity flow naturally through your site architecture. If a page genuinely shouldn’t be indexed, use noindex or robots rules, not nofollow.
A Decision Rule for Which Attribute to Use
Cut through the theory with a simple rule for your outbound links:
- Editorial link you genuinely endorse? Plain follow. No
rel. This is the default and the vast majority of your links. - Paid, affiliate, or sponsored in any way?
rel="sponsored". - A user or third party placed it (comment, forum, profile)?
rel="ugc", ideally automatically at the template level. - Citing a source you don’t want to vouch for (a competitor, a questionable claim, a login page)?
rel="nofollow".
For inbound links you have no direct control — you can’t dictate whether a site links to you follow or nofollow. What you control is earning links worth giving, and you take whatever attribute comes with them. Don’t decline coverage because a publisher nofollows; the referral traffic and brand lift usually outweigh the missing hint.
How to Audit Your Follow/Nofollow Mix
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. The practical move is to pull your referring domains and see the ratio of follow to nofollow, then sanity-check it against how the links were actually acquired. A profile that’s overwhelmingly follow with money-keyword anchors is worth a closer look before Google gives it one. SEO Rocket’s backlink analysis and referring-domains view lets you see that split and spot the toxic or clearly manipulative links worth disavowing, while its competitor link-gap analysis surfaces domains linking to rivals but not you — the honest prospect list for outreach. The tool won’t do the outreach or manufacture links; that relationship work is the human moat. What it does, across a playbook proven on 1,000,000+ ranking pages, is show you where you stand and where the real opportunities are, then track whether the links you earn actually move rankings. At roughly $50/month with a free tier, it turns “I think my profile looks fine” into something you can see.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are nofollow links bad for SEO?
No. Nofollow links won’t reliably pass ranking equity, but they drive referral traffic, build brand and entity signals, aid discovery, and keep your backlink profile looking natural. A profile with zero nofollow links looks more manipulated than one with a healthy mix, so nofollow backlinks are a normal, useful part of the picture — not something to avoid.
What’s the difference between dofollow and nofollow?
“Dofollow” isn’t a real HTML attribute — it’s slang for a normal link with no rel restriction, which passes signals by default. “Nofollow” is an actual attribute (rel="nofollow") that tells Google not to fully trust or count the link. Since 2019 it’s a hint Google can ignore, not a hard rule.
Should I nofollow affiliate links?
Yes. Google’s guidelines require you to mark paid and affiliate links so they don’t pass ranking signals. Use rel="sponsored" (the purpose-built tag) or rel="nofollow". Leaving affiliate links as plain follow links can be treated as participation in a link scheme and put both sites at risk.
Does nofollow still pass any value in 2026?
It might. Since the 2019 change nofollow is a hint, so Google can choose to follow the link and use its signals — but you can’t predict or measure when. Never build a strategy assuming a specific nofollow link passes equity; treat any ranking value as an unpredictable bonus on top of the referral and brand benefits you can count on.
