What is a nofollow link and does link building still work?
A nofollow link carries an HTML attribute (rel="nofollow") telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through it. It was introduced in 2005 to combat comment spam, and became the standard treatment for links a site does not vouch for — user-generated content, paid placements, and untrusted submissions.
A significant change in 2019: Google announced it would treat nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, meaning it may choose to consider such links for ranking. Two more specific attributes arrived alongside: rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content. So the old binary of "followed links count, nofollow links are worthless" no longer describes how it works.
Does link building still work? Links remain one of the more important ranking signals, and there is little indication that has changed. What has changed is what kind of link building works.
What does not work reliably any more: buying links at scale, link farms and private blog networks, reciprocal link schemes, mass directory submissions, and low-quality guest posting purely for the link. These are explicitly against search engine guidelines, are increasingly detected, and can trigger penalties.
What does work: being genuinely worth citing. Original research and data, useful free tools, definitive reference content, and digital PR that gives journalists a reason to link. These are slower and more expensive, which is precisely why they are harder to game.
Relevance and authority beat volume. A single link from a respected site in your field is worth more than hundreds from unrelated ones.
Nofollow links still have value beyond ranking — referral traffic, brand visibility, and the tendency for a visible mention to attract followed links from elsewhere.
Anchor text matters but over-optimised exact-match anchors across many sites is one of the clearest manipulation signals.