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Do nofollow links help SEO

You paid for a link, it came back nofollow, and somebody told you it was worthless. That was true until March 2019, and it has not been true since.

Part 1

It became a hint, not an instruction

In September 2019 Google announced that nofollow would be treated as a hint for ranking purposes, effective March 2020. Hint means they may use the link, and they will not tell you when. So the honest answer is that a nofollow link is worth something unknown and greater than zero.

Do this: Stop rejecting placements because the link is nofollow. Judge the placement by whether real people will see it.
Part 2

The traffic was always the point

A link on a page that people read sends you visitors, and those visitors are worth more than the ranking signal you are arguing about. A dofollow link on a page nobody visits sends you nothing at all.

Do this: Ask for the page’s traffic before you ask about the link attribute. If they cannot tell you, the link is decoration.
Part 3

The new attributes changed the question

Alongside nofollow there is now rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for comments and forums. Using sponsored on a paid link is what Google asks for, and refusing to mark a paid link is what gets sites into trouble.

Do this: If you paid for it, mark it sponsored. The risk of not marking it is much larger than the value of the signal.
Part 4

Where the effort should actually go

A link is one signal. A page nobody can crawl, an intent you did not match, or a title nobody clicks will each cost you more than the difference between nofollow and dofollow ever will.

Do this: Run the free page check first. Fix what it finds before you spend another hour on link attributes.

This is teaching material and our own reading of standard practice, not advice for your specific site. Check anything important with your own specialist.

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If a word here is unfamiliar it is defined in the SEO glossary. Two public penalties and one problem we found on our own network are pulled apart in the case studies, and the longer pieces live in the library.