Hi there, and welcome to issue #9 of the Outranked SEO newsletter.
In this issue, I’m breaking down why the opinions that many (most?!) SEOs hold about nofollow links need to change. The typical mindset of "they're worthless..." is SO outdated, and I'm ready to show why that's the case.
You’ll learn:
- Why nofollow links aren't worthless, like many SEOs believe
- How Google was forced to change nofollow from a directive to a hint
- What signals Google might be using to decide when nofollow links count
Let’s get into it.
💻 Psst...what are you doing next Thursday AM?
Myself and Digitaloft's Digital PR Director, Amy Irvine, are hosting a webinar on Thursday 17th July at 9.30am (UK).
We'll be talking about The Long-Term Impact of Digital PR on SEO Success: Proof It Works When You Stick With It.
We'll be sharing insights from 5 two-year long case studies on the outcomes that digital PR can drive, how we set the strategy up to see these results and the lessons we learned along the way.
I'd love you to join us!
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Nofollow links aren't worthless, despite what many SEOs claim.
When I started out in SEO in 2009, it was as clear as night and day ... nofollow links held no 'SEO value' at all. If it wasn't a followed link, it was considered worthless.
But that was 16 years ago (I'm feeling old right now...), and a lot has changed since then.
Many SEOs still hold this outdated viewpoint, however, and my goal today is to try and change that.
And no, I'm not going to talk about referral traffic etc. I'm talking about the SEO impact of these,
Nofollow changed from being a directive to a hint in 2019...
We're now almost six years on since Google announced that the nofollow attribute was evolving.
Here's what was said:
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.
When certain other signals exist, nofollow links can be treated like followed links.
And it’s easy to dismiss this as BS and keep thinking nothings changed, but I bet you’ve never stopped to think about why Google was forced to make this change?
Why nofollow became a hint…
I explained this at a conference I spoke at last month and had a number of people come up to me afterwards and say they’d never considered it this way before and that my summary changed their mindset.
And we've had pretty recent confirmation from Google on it.
In one of the documents released as part of Google's DOJ trial, Google Engineer HJ Kim confirmed the following:
It's not so much the confirmation that PageRank is still used as an input to the Quality score, hopefully that's not new news to you, but let's zoom in on "distance from a known good source."
Earlier this year I wrote a guide to seed sites and link distance ranking.
Google’s “Producing a ranking for pages using distances in a web-link graph” patent makes reference to a set of seed pages and a ranking score that is generated for each page within a set based on the distance of these from the seed pages.
This is known as link distance ranking, and the score calculated is based on the distance between a set of seed sites and the pages to be ranked. The shorter the distance between the seed sites and a webpage, the higher the score.
Distance means how many links away a webpage is. You may think of this like click depth from outbound links.
The New York Times is one example that Google has given, alongside the now-defunct Google directory. These are the only examples we have, but we know from the patent that these sites are:
- Reliable
- High-quality pages
- Well-connected to other non-seed pages (lots of outbound links)
We also know that "these sites are “diverse to cover a wide range of fields of public interests.”
Sounds a lot like press publications and the most authoritative ones in a niche, yeah?
This is so important to understanding nofollow becoming a hint.
Why?
Because in the period between 2016 and 2019, so many top-tier news sites began blanket nofollowing every outbound link. I won't go in detail as to the reasons, but I believe that many were concerned about being penalised for linking out with an assumption some of those links were actually sponsored.
Keep reading... it'll all make sense soon.
Blanket nofollowing of outbound links gave Google no choice other than to change how they handle this attribute…
A few months before the announcement that nofollow had changed to a hint, John Mueller was asked this in a Google Webmaster Central hangout:
What do you think about the practice of some big publishers tagging all outgoing links with rel=nofollow?
From what I know, the reasoning behind this is that with follow links you would leak link juice and then rank worse.
John's response?
So that’s definitely wrong. It’s definitely not the case that if you use normal links on your website that you would rank any worse than if you put nofollow on all outgoing links.
I suspect it’s even, on the contrary, that if you have normal linking on your page then you would probably rank a little bit better over time – essentially because we can see that you’re part of the normal web ecosystem.
So it’s definitely not the case that you have any kind of ranking advantage by marking all outgoing links as nofollow.
The impact of this is way bigger than most people thought.
With so many publishers nofollowing every oubound link, did Google lose the ability to calculate PageRank properly? Based on the concept of seed sites and link distance ranking?
Google itself says:
Google uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.
Let's not overlook the fact that Google uses links to discover new pages across the web, too.
If so many sites that most likely formed part of Google's corpus of seed sites were nofollowing every outbound link, this set of sites essentially became smaller.
Let's say 1 in 3 big publishers blanket nofollowed outbound links (which, from our own link data from 2018/2019, I'd say is a pretty good estimate), that's a loss of Google's set of seed sites by a third.
Just let that sink in.
I believe Google was forced to do something about this.
Links from top publishers and authoritative sites form the foundation of the more recent incarnation of PageRank.
The solution to overcome this?
Turn nofollow into a hint, and treat nofollowed links the same as followed links (i.e. have them pass PageRank) when certain other signals exist.
Those signals?
Without a doubt, they're related to traffic that either the site or the page is getting. We can piece this together from other DOJ documents and last year's leak.
What this means…
Stop thinking that nofollow links are worthless and have no ability to influence SEO success.
When the right conditions exist, there's lots of evidence (including many tests that myself and others have done over the years) that nofollow links can, and do, influence SEO success.
These conditions are traffic.
In other words ... a nofollow link on The Telegraph, The Guardian or The Sun is as valuable as a followed link on those publications.
It makes no sense for these publications to be blanket nofollowing links, and Google knows that. They can't change what the publishers do, so they changed how they handle nofollow at their end.
In 2025, a link from within relevant content on an authoritative publication is valuable to SEOs regardless of whether it's followed or nofollow.
Search keeps evolving, and with it our mindsets need to as well.
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If you learned something from this issue or it’s made you think about SEO a little differently, please consider forwarding it to someone else on your team.
I’m on a mission to make sure more SEO investment actually has an impact on real business metrics.
Appreciate you making it to the end; same time next week?
- James Brockbank
P.S. If you ever need expert support with SEO or digital PR and want to drive results that actually matter, I’d love to chat. Let’s talk.
✍️ From the Loft...
Fresh from our side of the web; here’s a few things me and other Lotties put out into the world this week.
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📌 This week’s bookmarks:
If I could only send three links to a fellow marketer this week, it’d be these…
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👋 Hi, I'm James...
Managing Director & Founder at Digitaloft.
I've spent the last 10 years building an agency that's perfectly positioned to help ambitious brands to drive real business growth from SEO and digital PR.
You might have seen me speaking at events like BrightonSEO, SMX and the International Search Summit.
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