Nearly 80% say nofollow links still affect rankings

Editorial.link's 2025 practitioner survey finds roughly eighty per cent of respondents believe nofollow backlinks still meaningfully affect rankings, despite Google's long-standing official guidance that the attribute removes the link from PageRank flow. The practitioner view reflects observed correlations, since sites accumulating substantial nofollow link volume tend to improve in rankings, and the suspicion that Google's 2019 reclassification of nofollow as a “hint” rather than a directive meaningfully changed how the signal is interpreted. The old binary of dofollow-equals-value, nofollow-equals-nothing is now firmly minority opinion. Programme budgets are reflecting this: agencies routinely buy nofollow placements rather than reject them out of hand.