Google Says The Nofollow Is Not A Dampening Factor

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the “nofollow is not a dampening factor.” Meaning, when you put a nofollow attribute on a link, it does not dampen the value of the link, it totally does not give any credit or value to that link at all.

There have historically been some SEOs that believe a nofollowed link on a popular website is counted or counted on some level. John here is saying once again that no, it doesn’t matter where the link is, if the link has a nofollow attribute on it, Google won’t count it.

That means, a nofollow link on Google.com or WhiteHouse.gov or wsj.com or any really popular site is worth as much as a nofollow link on this site or any spammy website. The nofollowed links are all worth nothing in terms of Google’s link signals, PageRank and anything else that flows from the link in Google’s alogorithm.

Here are those tweets:

No, that’s not correct – nofollow is not a dampening factor.

— 🦝 John (personal) 🦝 (@JohnMu) March 29, 2022

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In short, a nofollow link is worth zero in terms of Google’s link graph, so there is no dampening zero anymore.

You should of course read Google’s details on the nofollow attribute – it is from 2019 when Google made changes to nofollow.

Forum discussion at Twitter.