Can Removing NoFollow Sitewide Help Improve Rankings?

Recently, I've been questioning a lot of assumptions about SEO. A lot of the common wisdom has been turned on its head over the last few years, and it doesn't seem like anything is going to be done about it, so I'm interested in re-evaluating some of the details we take for granted.

Today, the center of my scrutiny is the NoFollow attribute. It's a useful tool, but does it really work the way we all thought it does, and is it even necessary these days?

What Does NoFollow Do?

Let's start by talking about what NoFollow is and what it does.

It all goes back to the core idea of Google, which is that links are a form of endorsement.

When you follow history all the way back to the beginnings of Google, when the earliest versions of PageRank were being developed, it was very simple. A link from Site A to Site B was a sign that Site A found Site B valuable; therefore, Site B has more value than Site C, which doesn't have a link. Site B could then be ranked above Site C in a list.

This basic concept spiraled out into basically everything to do with SEO today. Everything else is a modifier, a way of identifying how valuable those links should be, how valuable the sites should be, whether or not there are overriding factors that should remove a site from the running or promote it more, and so on.

But there are a lot of situations where your site might have a link on it, but where you don't want to endorse that site.

• Blog comments; if someone leaves a comment with their link in it, it's a link from your site to theirs.
• Guest posts. A third party submitting content for you to publish, linking to sites you may not personally endorse.
• Example links. Sometimes, you want to link to a site you don't endorse, to use as an example of what not to do.

Of those, the biggest concerns were things like the first one. It was part of user-generated content spam; any avenue a user could use to generate spam links to boost a site without the site owner's approval or endorsement.

Google joined up with the other search engines at the time (Bing and Yahoo) to make NoFollow, all the way back in 2005. It's an attribute you add to a hyperlink. In code, it looks like this:

• <a href="www.example.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a>

It's one of many possible link attributes, and it's entirely optional. That is, links still function just fine without specifying it.

The idea behind the attribute is simple. If Google is indexing your page, it's going to crawl the links on the page and contextualize them. If it sees the NoFollow attribute, it knows that you don't endorse the site on the other end. 

When it was introduced, this was a mechanical way of saying "don't pass link juice to this site." 

Note the past tense.

The 2019 Change to NoFollow

In 2019, Google changed how NoFollow works, along with adding two new link attributes: ugc and sponsored. 

• UGC: User-Generated Content, meant for things like blog comments and forum posts.
• Sponsored: Self-explanatory, meant for links with financial incentive, like affiliate links.

At this time, Google's indexing and ranking algorithms reached a point of sophistication where they could be trusted to make judgments based on context. Google decided that the NoFollow attribute, which used to be a directive, would now be a suggestion.

What this means is that when you add NoFollow to a link, Google sees it, but they ultimately make the decisions themselves whether or not they pass any value to that link. Danny Sullivan phrases it as it now being a "hint" rather than a rule.

This has some potentially large implications for sites, but not in the way you might think.

You might get value from previously-worthless links. Probably not comment links, but editorial links from guest posts or even site-native content could suddenly start to count for you when they didn't before.

It can be harder to get links at all from outreach. Site owners who recognize this now no longer have a firm way to tell Google they don't think a link should be followed, so instead, your links will either be tagged sponsored (even if no money is exchanged for it) or, more likely, just removed instead. It's harder now than it used to be to get even casual byline links.

All of this compounds with Google's link relevance algorithms. Google had already been working on ways to contextualize and give different relevance to different links. Links in footers or sidebars are worse than links in content, and links to relevant resources are given more value than links to irrelevant pages. The NoFollow attribute just adds a little guidance and a little intent to your linking.

Backlinks pointing to your site, especially older links with the NoFollow attribute, often gained value out of this change. Conversely, new links are harder to build. 

But that's not what I'm really interested in today.

The Core Question: Are NoFollow Tags Worth Using Now?

As a site owner, should you pay attention to tagging links with NoFollow, or not?

I think the answer depends a lot on how you were using it before.

I know a lot of sites used to just tag everything as NoFollow unless they had a specific reason not to. In fact, I think this kind of broad over-use of NoFollow is a big part of why Google implemented this change in the first place. 

Website owners used to try to sculpt their link juice flows using these attributes. They would try to funnel SEO value to pages they support, while NoFollowing anything they didn't. Google caught onto that pretty quickly and made it so your outbound link juice would be equally divided between all links on the page, but NoFollow just prevented it from passing; it didn't redirect that flow to the followed links.

On the flip side, some website owners never bothered using NoFollow at all. I've known large sites that let the CMS do whatever it's configured to as a default (such as tagging comment links with NoFollow), but that was it. They ranked and grew just fine.

My Conclusion

Personally, I think NoFollow is useful specifically as a means of showing intentionality to Google.

If you put NoFollow on a link, there's still a good chance Google can decide the site at the other end is fine, and pass some of your SEO value to it. 

What impact does this have on you? Nothing at all. It's not like you have a fuel tank, and that added link drains your fuel faster. You lose nothing at all for having that link followed or not. In fact, there's no way for you to even tell whether or not Google is counting that link.

What NoFollow does is tell Google that you're paying attention to the links you publish. It says, "Hey, we know this site might not be relevant, but we wanted the link anyway. You don't have to count it."

If you don't care about that intentionality, or you want to demonstrate it in other ways, that's fine too. I honestly think NoFollow itself could be deprecated, except for the fact that it's still load-bearing for a lot of UGC links across the web.

The huge majority of NoFollow links out there on the wider internet today are links that, today, would be tagged with either rel="sponsored" or rel="UGC". Blog comment links and affiliate links are the big ones here.

I feel comfortable in saying the majority, too, because of the relative amount of time involved. NoFollow existed for 15 years before the change, and many people still use it the way it was used when it was introduced. The new function has only existed for about five years. The sheer volume of published links indicates the vast majority of NoFollow links are used for the old purpose rather than the new.

Can Your Site Benefit from Removing NoFollow Tags?

So, could your site benefit if you went through and removed NoFollow from every link on your site?

I would say that 99% of the time, the answer is no.

The thing about NoFollow is that it affects sites downstream from you, not your own site. It's about the outflow of SEO value.

You would benefit if a site that linked to you a lot removed NoFollow from those links, but you don't benefit by removing the attribute yourself.

Why only 99%? Sometimes, you would see old sites that mass-tagged links with NoFollow and hit internal links as well. If your internal links are NoFollowed, it tells Google that you didn't really know what you were doing. By removing that attribute, you fix an old mistake.

There's also one other case to be aware of, and that's if you're removing NoFollow and not replacing it where it matters.

See, I personally think that NoFollow isn't very useful anymore. If I'm linking out to a site, it's generally because there's good information on it, so they should benefit from it.

If there's a financial incentive, like an affiliate link, the correct tag is rel="sponsored" instead of NoFollow. It's more specific; it tells Google exactly why the link is there and exactly why you think it shouldn't be followed. You still leave the decision up to Google, but you're being specific about the details.

If the link is something a user could create, like blog comment links, it should be tagged with rel="UGC" instead of NoFollow. UGC is a much clearer signal that the link wasn't put there by you, and shouldn't be treated as such.

I'm largely of the opinion that blog comment links should be removed entirely (though you shouldn't remove comments themselves), or at least you can use them as a honeypot for spam. Sometimes a link can be relevant, though, so it's up to you whether or not you want to use that method.

Where does NoFollow fit in this paradigm? Well, sometimes you'll see lists of cases where you should use NoFollow, like this:

• Links to sites you do not fully trust.
• Links in untrusted user comments.
• Links to your own system pages, like login or admin pages.
• Links to old or outdated sources cited for context.

To this I respond: you don't need NoFollow for any of these.

For sites you don't fully trust, just don't link to them. You can probably find a better source for the information on it, right? Or, if you're linking to it because of bad information (such as in a post discussing misinformation), you could screenshot it instead. There's no reason to even risk sending traffic to a site you don't trust, and if you trust it enough to link to it, just link to it.

For user comments, that's what UGC is for now. There's no reason not to make sure your CMS is appending UGC to comments and similar links instead of NoFollow. If comment spam is a recurring problem, it's worth understanding why Akismet doesn't catch all blog comment spam.

For system pages, you shouldn't be linking to them in publicly visible places anyway. If those links exist for some reason, they should be blocked with robots.txt instead.

For old and outdated sources, why is that less of a reason to pass value to the site? There's still value there, so just let the link ride. For a broader look at how to handle all types of links on your site, see our WordPress link optimization guide.

Should You Remove NoFollow From Your Site?

I wouldn't bother.

I don't think there's much of a reason to use NoFollow specifically anymore. But you do still need to use UGC and Sponsored tags. If you remove NoFollow, make sure you use UGC for comments and Sponsored for incentivized links. 

The only NoFollow tags you should 100% remove are the ones pointing to internal, non-system pages. If you accidentally NoFollowed all links on your site, including links from one blog post to another, or from a blog post to a product page, those should have the NoFollow attribute removed.

The crux of the issue, though, is whether or not you could benefit from any of this.

Personally, I don't think so. Maybe if you had NoFollow on your internal links and you removed it, you could benefit a little. But Google is smart enough to recognize internal links and follow them anyway. It's been five years since they made the change to make NoFollow a hint, so any changes you would have seen about that would have happened back in 2020, not now.

There's no real benefit to be had from removing NoFollow from your site.

Potential Indirect Benefits

At least, not directly. And here's where we get into a little bit of sociology.

See, even if NoFollow isn't as big a deal anymore, a huge number of website owners still think it's a hard directive rather than a hint. There are a million posts out there about how NoFollow works, and a lot of them use old information, after all. It's an easy mistake to make.

So, you could benefit from removing NoFollow, indirectly. Eventually.

What would happen is that, over time, outreach companies and tools will notice that you don't NoFollow your outbound links. That, along with a "write for us" or submit a guest post page, would encourage other sites to reach out to you. They want their followed backlinks, if they can get them, so you become a high-value outreach target.

Then, you can encourage reciprocal behavior. You can't do a deliberate link exchange (that's against Google policies), but you can encourage contributors to link to the posts they contribute, and you can even say, "Hey, our link is followed, maybe yours should be too". As long as there's real, tangible value, and as long as no money or barter changed hands, it's fine.

So, eventually, it can serve as a way to increase your backlink profile. But, you also need to be careful with who you accept and let into your plan here, otherwise you end up with a lot of low-quality or shady backlinks, and that's not going to help you out much.

So, when it comes down to it, I don't think there's a lot of true incentive to remove NoFollow from your site. But, it also probably isn't going to hurt you, as long as you appropriately add in Sponsored and UGC tags where relevant.

If you happen to know of a case study or an example that says otherwise, I'd love to see it!