Do Nofollow Links Help SEO? (And Should You Accept One?)

Do nofollow links help SEO? The short answer

Not as a ranking signal, in the normal case. In its September 2019 announcement, Google moved nofollow and two new attributes to a "hint" model and said: "In most cases, the move to a hint model won't change the nature of how we treat such links. We'll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes."

Two words in that sentence matter: "generally" and "hint". A hint means Google can choose to use a link, so a nofollow link is not guaranteed to count for nothing. Google hasn't said when it does, so don't plan around it. Treat a nofollow link as one that probably passes no ranking credit, and judge it on what else it does for you.

What Google actually says about nofollow, sponsored and ugc

Google's guide to qualifying outbound links defines three values. For an ordinary link, it says, "you don't need to add a rel attribute":

The dates matter because older advice is still everywhere. The September 2019 post made all three values ranking hints from that day. For crawling and indexing, nofollow became a hint on 1 March 2020. Advice from before then that says nofollow links are ignored completely describes the old rule.

There is no "dofollow" value. A followed link is simply a link without one of these three values.

What a nofollow link still does

Ranking credit is one thing a link can carry, but not the only one:

• Visitors. Readers can't see the attribute, so they click a nofollow link the same way as any other. A nofollow link on a page your buyers read is still a referral source.
• Being read. The sentence around the link names your brand to everyone who reads the page, whether or not they click.
• A way to be found. Writers who come across you on that page can link to you from their own articles, with ordinary links. Nothing guarantees it, but a mention nobody sees can't lead anywhere.

A useful test: would you want this mention if links passed no ranking credit at all? If yes, take it whatever the attribute. If the only value you can see is ranking credit, a nofollow link has little to offer you.

Can nofollow links hurt you?

Neither Google's link attribute guide nor its spam policies describe a penalty for receiving nofollow links, and since Google generally doesn't consider them for ranking, there is little for them to affect.

The risk in the spam policies sits elsewhere. "Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links" is listed as link spam, and the same policy says that buying and selling links is "not a violation of our policies" as long as the links "are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value." Google's manual actions report has a penalty for each side: "Unnatural links to your site" for the site being linked to, and "Unnatural links from your site" for the site doing the linking. So the tag is what keeps a paid link inside the rules, for buyer and seller alike. If you want to deal with links you never asked for, our guide to disavowing backlinks covers when that is worth doing.

Should you accept a nofollow link?

If it's free, usually yes. Turning down a mention because of its attribute costs you the visitors and the readers and gains you nothing. Accept it when:

• the page is about your topic and the mention sits where a reader would follow it,
• the site has real readers in your market (check that it ranks for searches in your field, and that people comment or share),
• you'd be glad to be named there even if no one ever clicked.

It's fine to ask once, politely, whether the link could be a normal one. Some sites tag every outside link as a policy, so expect a no sometimes, and don't make it a condition. Don't offer anything of value in return for removing the tag: Google's spam policies also list "exchanging goods or services for links", so at that point you have bought the link.

Are nofollow backlinks worth paying for?

Only for what the placement does besides ranking. A correctly tagged paid link is an ad, so judge it the way you would judge a newsletter sponsorship or a banner: does the page get traffic from people who could buy from you, and is the price sensible for that traffic? If the page has no readers, a tagged link on it is worth close to nothing, however high the site's domain rating.

What you should not do is pay for a link to be left untagged. A rate card offering "dofollow, not marked as sponsored" is selling exactly the arrangement Google's spam policies describe as link spam, with the risk on both sides described above. Our guide to buying backlinks covers where paid placements carry the most risk, and white hat link building covers links you earn without paying. When a blogger asks for money, see what to do when a blogger asks for money for a backlink.

What our live links look like

Every night, MentionAgent's placement checker fetches the pages where a publisher's link should be for each active outreach thread, and records any link it finds exactly as it appears in the HTML, attributes included. The table covers every distinct link it found live between 26 September and 7 October 2026.

Read this with the sample in mind. 63% were two-way link exchanges, where the checker also found the customer's link back; 4% were waiting on that return link; 2% were marked paid; and 32% we can't classify. So the table shows what links from exchanges and outreach looked like in our records, not what paid placements look like.

The noopener and noreferrer values are browser settings, often added to links that open in a new tab; Google's guide lists only sponsored, ugc and nofollow as ways to qualify a link. One publisher had written rel="dofollow", which does nothing: the link counts as followed because nothing tags it otherwise.

When publishers bring it up

MentionAgent users had replies on 2,802 outreach threads between 1 June and 7 October 2026. We counted the threads where the publisher's own words mentioned a link attribute, then read random samples by hand:

So when a publisher volunteers that a link will be "dofollow", it is usually part of a price list. Of the 25 we read, the other six were a link exchange offer, a reply about a link already in place, and four guideline or offer emails where the passage we read did not say whether they charge.

Read the second row next to Google's policy. A paid post with a dofollow link and no sponsored label is a paid link not "qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value", which is what the spam policies call link spam, and the manual actions report covers both the site selling it and the site it points to. For what these offers usually cost, see our breakdown of what backlinks cost.

For publishers: should sponsored posts be nofollow?

Yes, the links in them should be tagged. Google's guide says to mark "advertisements or paid placements" with rel="sponsored", and that nofollow "is still an acceptable way to flag them." In its 2019 post, Google said of the two for paid links: "We prefer the use of sponsored, but either is fine and will be treated the same, for this purpose." You can also give a link more than one value; the guide's own example is rel="ugc nofollow".

Links you add because they help your readers need no attribute. That includes a source you cite after a stranger's outreach email pointed you to it, as long as nothing was paid or given for the link. If you get a lot of link requests, our guide to responding to link exchange requests covers which ones are worth answering.

Nofollow links and AI answers

Google's documentation of these attributes is about Google Search: ranking and crawling. We haven't found documentation from OpenAI, Google's Gemini team or Anthropic on whether their assistants take rel attributes into account, and we have no data either way. What the attribute doesn't change is the text on the page: if an assistant reads a page that describes your product, the description is there whether the link next to it is followed or not.

For what does get brands named in AI answers, see how to get mentioned by ChatGPT and unlinked brand mentions. Wikipedia is a well-known example of a nofollow source; whether a page there is worth having is covered in does a Wikipedia page help SEO.

How to check whether a link is nofollow

Enter the page's URL in MentionAgent's free nofollow link checker, which lists every link on the page and whether it is dofollow, nofollow, sponsored or ugc. To check by hand, right-click the link, choose Inspect, and look at the rel attribute on the <a> tag: no rel, or only noopener or noreferrer, means a followed link.

Check the live page rather than trusting the email, and check again later: links can be edited or removed after they go up.

Method

• Live links. MentionAgent's placement checker, which started storing results in late September 2026. Every distinct link (page plus link URL) seen live between 26 September and 7 October 2026, including a few since removed. The rel value is read from the publisher's HTML. MentionAgent's own sales outreach is excluded.
• Link type. "Two-way exchange" means the checker also found the customer's link back on their own site. We can't see payments made outside MentionAgent.
• Replies. 2,802 outreach threads with at least one inbound reply between 1 June and 7 October 2026, including some automated replies, with quoted earlier emails stripped. A thread counts for a row when the publisher's text contains the term, for example "dofollow", "do-follow" or "do follow".
• Hand reads. 25 "dofollow" threads drawn at random and 15 of the 53 "no sponsored label" threads. For each we read the passage around the matched term (about 150 to 230 characters) and classified it by hand.
• No reply text is published. The figures are counts; the quoted phrases on this page are Google's.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides