If you have spent any time working with SEO services in Sri Lanka or elsewhere in the world, you have almost certainly stumbled into the nofollow debate. One camp insists that nofollow links are essentially worthless — digital dead ends that pass no authority and contribute nothing meaningful to your rankings. The other camp argues they are an underrated asset that most people dismiss too quickly. The truth, as is often the case in SEO, sits somewhere in the middle — but it leans more toward "valuable" than most people realise.
Let's unpack this properly, because the nuance here actually matters a great deal for how you build your link profile.
What Is a Nofollow Link, Exactly?
When a website links to another site, it can attach a rel="nofollow" attribute to that link. This was originally introduced by Google in 2005 as a way to combat comment spam — if bloggers could mark links in their comment sections as nofollow, spammers would have less incentive to flood those sections with keyword-stuffed URLs.
The general understanding that followed was simple: dofollow links pass PageRank (the algorithmic signal Google uses to measure a page's authority), while nofollow links do not. For years, the SEO community treated this as settled gospel. Why bother earning a nofollow link when it does not move the needle on rankings?
But then Google updated things in 2019, and the conversation got a lot more interesting.
Google's 2019 Shift Changed Everything
In September 2019, Google announced that it would begin treating nofollow as a hint rather than a strict directive. Two new link attributes were also introduced — rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content — but the bigger revelation was buried in that announcement: Google said it might choose to use nofollow links for crawling and indexing purposes when it found it valuable to do so.
That single sentence quietly demolished the idea that nofollow links are categorically useless. If Google is willing to follow them for discovery and even consider them as ranking signals in some cases, then dismissing them entirely is a mistake.
The practical implication is significant. A nofollow link from a high-authority publication — say, a mention in a major news article or a reference from a well-regarded industry blog — may carry more weight than a dofollow link from an obscure, low-traffic website that nobody visits and Google barely trusts.
The Indirect Benefits Are Very Real
Even if you set aside the technical debate about whether nofollow links pass PageRank, their indirect benefits are substantial and often underestimated.
Traffic is traffic. A link is a pathway. If someone reads an article on a popular website and clicks through to your page, that visitor does not know or care whether the link that brought them there was nofollow or dofollow. If your content is good, they will engage with it, share it, and maybe link to it themselves — often with a dofollow link. One nofollow link on a high-traffic page can trigger a chain of organic dofollow links that never would have existed otherwise.
Brand visibility compounds over time. Getting your business mentioned on respected platforms — even with a nofollow tag — puts your brand in front of the right audiences. In industries like hotels SEO, where trust and reputation are everything, consistent visibility on reputable travel platforms, review sites, and editorial publications builds the kind of brand equity that search engines notice even when they can't directly quantify it.
Referral traffic signals engagement. When users consistently arrive at your site via a particular link and then spend time reading, browsing, or converting, those behavioural signals are registered by Google. A nofollow link that drives quality traffic and strong on-site engagement is, in a very real sense, influencing your SEO — just through a different mechanism than PageRank.
A Natural Link Profile Requires Nofollow Links
Here is something that experienced SEO practitioners understand that beginners often miss: a link profile that consists entirely of dofollow links looks deeply unnatural.
Think about how links actually work in the real world. Wikipedia is one of the most-linked-to websites on the internet, and virtually all of Wikipedia's outbound links are nofollow. News sites, major forums, social media platforms, review aggregators, and many high-traffic blogs either nofollow their links by default or selectively nofollow external ones. If you are earning links from real sources and real publications, a significant portion of those links will naturally be nofollow.
A website where every single incoming link is dofollow raises red flags. It suggests that the links may have been manufactured — purchased, exchanged, or otherwise acquired in ways that violate Google's guidelines. A healthy link profile, one that looks like it was built by a website people genuinely value, will always contain a mix of both.
This is something any quality link building service will tell you upfront. Chasing only dofollow links and ignoring nofollow opportunities does not just leave value on the table — it can actually make your backlink profile look suspicious.
The Industries Where This Matters Most
In competitive niches, the distinction between dofollow and nofollow links becomes especially important to understand. Consider the travel and hospitality sector. Hotels, resorts, and booking platforms live and die by their online visibility, and the nature of that industry means a significant portion of incoming links will come from review sites like TripAdvisor, travel blogs, and aggregator platforms — many of which use nofollow attributes on external links. If hotel marketers wrote off every nofollow link as worthless, they'd be ignoring some of the most valuable referral traffic and brand-building opportunities available to them.
Similarly, e-commerce brands get a huge portion of their nofollow links from social media, comparison sites, and content platforms. Treating these as worthless misses the point of what links actually do in the broader ecosystem.
Should You Actively Pursue Nofollow Links?
The practical question is whether you should go out of your way to build nofollow links. The honest answer is: it depends on the source.
You shouldn't pursue nofollow links simply because they are nofollow. That would be just as misguided as refusing them simply because they are nofollow. The question you should always be asking is whether the link source is valuable — whether it brings relevant traffic, whether it puts your brand in front of the right audience, whether it would help even if search engines did not exist.
If the answer is yes, then the nofollow attribute is largely irrelevant. Pursue the link.
Professional web designers in Sri Lanka and digital marketers who understand the full picture of SEO know that a link's value extends beyond its technical attributes. The best links are the ones that connect you to real audiences — and whether or not they pass PageRank is secondary to whether they generate genuine interest in what you do.
What This Means in Practice
When building your SEO strategy, the healthiest approach is to focus on earning mentions, citations, and references from sources that genuinely matter to your audience. Some of those will be dofollow. Many will be nofollow. Both contribute to your overall digital footprint, your brand's perceived authority, and — directly or indirectly — your search engine performance.
Stop sorting links into "good" (dofollow) and "worthless" (nofollow) categories. That mental model is outdated, oversimplified, and increasingly at odds with how Google actually operates. Instead, sort them by the quality of the source and the relevance of the audience. A nofollow mention in a respected industry publication is worth more than a dofollow link from a spammy directory that nobody visits.
SEO has always rewarded those who think about the long game. Nofollow links, earned from sources that genuinely value your content, are part of that long game — and the practitioners who understand this tend to build stronger, more sustainable rankings than those who fixate on the technical attribute alone.
The debate was never really about dofollow versus nofollow. It was always about quality versus quantity, and genuine value versus manufactured shortcuts. Frame it that way, and the answer becomes much clearer.