Do Nofollow Backlinks Help SEO? We Checked 495 Sites

What a nofollow link actually is

A nofollow link is a normal link with one extra bit of markup:

<a href="https://yoursite.com" rel="nofollow">my site</a>

That rel="nofollow" tells Google "don't count this as a vote for that page." It was added back in 2005, and the reason was blog comment spam. People were dropping links in comment sections by the million, and site owners needed a way to say "I didn't choose this link, don't hold it against me and don't reward it."

Two things changed since then, and both matter:

September 2019. Google split nofollow into three values. rel="ugc" for user-generated content like comments and forum posts. rel="sponsored" for paid and affiliate links. Plain rel="nofollow" for everything else. Most sites never bothered to switch, so you'll still see plain nofollow on comment forms today.

March 2020. Google started treating all three as hints instead of hard rules. Their words, not ours. A hint means Google reserves the right to look at the link anyway and decide what to do with it.

That's the whole factual base. Everything past this point is inference, including ours. Nobody outside Google can measure how a hint gets applied, and anyone who tells you they have the exact number is selling something.

Do nofollow backlinks help SEO?

Short answer: not the way a dofollow link does. But they do things a dofollow link on a dead directory can't.

Here's what a nofollow link on a real site still gets you.

Traffic. This is the boring one and it's the one that pays. A link in a Reddit thread that 4,000 people read sends you actual humans. A dofollow link on a directory nobody visits sends you nothing but a row in Ahrefs. One of those pays rent.

Discovery. Googlebot follows links to find pages. Even when it doesn't count a link as a vote, the crawler still walks the web. A brand new site with zero links has a crawl problem before it has a ranking problem. Getting mentioned on a page Google crawls hourly fixes the crawl problem fast.

Brand queries. People read your name, then search it later. Brand searches are one of the few signals that's hard to fake and clearly good for you. Our own Search Console shows this pattern in reverse: the site's biggest query is a brand name we don't own, which is exactly the problem you want to avoid.

Looking normal. A backlink profile that's 100% dofollow looks built, because real ones never are. Every real site picks up nofollow links from Reddit, forums, and comment sections without trying. If yours has none, that's a pattern.

What nofollow links don't do: move you up for a hard keyword on their own. If you need to rank for "project management software," a hundred comment links won't get you there. Nothing about this post says otherwise.

What we found in our own directory

We track link_type on every site we list. Here's the current state of 495 published entries:

Two things worth pulling out of that table.

The unverified third is the real story. We check link_type by hand, one site at a time, and 176 of them still aren't done. Any list that claims 100% dofollow across hundreds of sites either didn't check or is guessing. Sites change this setting without telling anyone. A directory that was dofollow in 2023 may not be now.

The nofollow pile is not the junk pile. Sorted by DR, our confirmed-nofollow entries include some of the strongest sites in the whole list:

If you filter your whole strategy on dofollow, you just cut Reddit and Product Hunt out of it. That's not a strategy, that's a spreadsheet running your life.

Comment backlinks: where they fit

Blog commenting is the oldest link tactic there is, and it earned its bad name honestly. For about ten years people ran automated tools that posted "Great post! Check out my site" on anything with a comment box. That's why nofollow exists in the first place.

So here's the honest position on comment links.

They are almost always nofollow. Assume it. Most comment systems, including Disqus, add the attribute automatically. If you find a dofollow comment section, it's usually because the site owner never configured anything, and that's not a promise you can plan around.

They are worth an hour a week, not a weekend. A comment link is cheap to place and cheap to lose. Treat it as a traffic and discovery play. If the post you're commenting on gets 200 readers a month and 30 of them read the comments, that's a small trickle of relevant people. Multiply by 50 posts and it stops being nothing.

The value is in the page, not the domain. This is the part most lists get wrong. A DR 80 news site's dead 2019 article is worth less to you than a DR 20 blog post that's still getting readers this week. You're commenting on a page, so judge the page.

Relevance decides everything. A comment on a post about your actual problem space can send a reader who's already looking for what you built. The same comment on a recipe blog sends nobody and looks like exactly what it is.

How to leave a comment that doesn't get deleted

This is the part that actually decides whether the hour was worth it. Most comments get removed, and they get removed for the same handful of reasons every time.

Read the post first. All of it. Your comment has to prove you did. This sounds obvious and it's the single biggest filter, because the spam it competes with never does.

Add one thing the post doesn't have. A number, a counter-case, a "we tried this and here's where it broke." One specific fact is enough. If your comment could be pasted under any post on the site, it's getting deleted.

Don't lead with the link. Write the comment. If the link genuinely belongs, put it at the end, and only when it's the thing that supports what you just said. A comment that's three sentences of filler wrapped around a URL is transparent.

Use the website field. Almost every comment form has Name / Email / Website. That field is where your link goes. It's a normal use of the form, it doesn't interrupt anything, and moderators don't mind it. In-body links are what gets flagged.

Use a real name and a real photo. Set up a Gravatar once and your face shows up on most comment systems automatically. Anonymous comments with a company name in the name field get deleted on sight.

Come back once. If the author replies, reply again. That's the difference between a link and a relationship, and the second one occasionally turns into a guest post.

Rough hit rate to expect: leave 20 careful comments, expect 12 to 15 to survive moderation. Automated garbage survives at close to zero, which is why the bar is lower than it looks.

Where to find pages that still take comments

This is the annoying part. Most blogs turned comments off years ago. Finding the ones that didn't, on pages that still get readers, is most of the work.

You can do it by hand with search operators:

"leave a comment" + "your topic"
"comments are closed" -site:yoursite.com
inurl:blog "post a comment" your niche

That works and it's slow. You'll open 40 pages to find 6 that still have an open form, and half of those will be moderated into oblivion.

We built our comment link list to skip that step. It's a set of pages that currently accept comments, pulled from live backlink data and checked before it goes in. Every entry is a specific page, not a homepage, because you can't comment on a homepage. Current state:

• 94 pages across 94 domains
• Authority Score range 0 to 21, average 5.6
• 15 pages at AS 10 or above

Two things to be straight about, since we'd rather you hear it here than feel misled later.

The Authority Scores are low. That's Semrush's 0-100 domain score, and 5.6 average is a small-blog number. This isn't a list of DR 90 news sites with open comment forms, because those mostly don't exist. It's a list of real pages you can actually get a link on today.

The full URLs are behind the paywall. Domain, page count, and Authority Score are open to everyone. The exact page URLs need a Pro plan. We're telling you upfront so you don't click through expecting the full list for free.

Every entry gets checked for 404 and 500 before it's loaded, dead pages get dropped, and there's a per-project submit tracker on each row so you don't comment on the same page twice.

When comment links are just spam

Worth saying plainly, because the line isn't blurry.

You're over it when:

• You're posting the same comment text on more than one site.
• You're using a tool to place them.
• You wouldn't post the comment if it didn't have a link in it.
• You're commenting on posts you didn't read, in a language you don't speak, on topics you know nothing about.
• You bought a "10,000 comment backlinks" package. That is a link scheme under Google's spam policies, and the downside isn't "it doesn't work," it's a manual action.

Nothing in this post is a workaround for that. If your plan is volume, comment links are the wrong tool and always were.

Nofollow platforms worth your time anyway

These are all in our directory, all nofollow or partly nofollow, and all worth doing for reasons that have nothing to do with PageRank.

If you want dofollow on top of this, Tumblr (DR 99), Blogger (DR 94), Substack (DR 93), LiveJournal (DR 91) and SitePoint Forums (DR 89) are all confirmed dofollow in our data. Ko-fi and Letterboxd are nofollow but take five minutes each if you're filling out a profile set.

Common mistakes

• Filtering the whole plan on dofollow. You just deleted Reddit and Product Hunt from your list.
• Trusting a "dofollow" label you didn't check. Ours is hand-verified and it's still only 48% done. Everyone else's is worse.
• Judging a comment page by domain DR. You're getting a link on one page. Look at whether that page still has readers.
• Commenting to place a link. Moderators have seen ten thousand of these. Yours isn't different.
• Doing comment links instead of the real work. This is a side dish. Your own content and a handful of strong dofollow listings are the meal.
• Chasing the same page twice. Easy to do across months. Track what you've submitted.

Dofollow vs nofollow: how to split your time

A rough weekly split that holds up for a small product:

If comment links are more than 5% of your week, something's off. If they're 0%, you're leaving a cheap, low-risk channel on the table for a reason that turns out to be half-true.

FAQ

Do nofollow links pass any link equity? By design, no. Google says it treats nofollow as a hint since March 2020, which means it may consider the link. Nobody outside Google can measure that. Plan as if the answer is no and take the traffic as the actual payoff.

Are comment backlinks safe? A few careful comments on relevant posts are safe. Bulk automated commenting is a link scheme under Google's spam policies and can earn a manual action. The risk is entirely in the volume and the automation, not in commenting itself.

Should my backlink profile have nofollow links in it? Yes. Every real site has them. A profile that's 100% dofollow is the unusual one.

How many comment links should I go after? An hour a week, maybe 10 to 20 good comments a month. If you're counting in thousands, you've switched tactics without noticing.

Is a DR 20 blog with an active comment section better than a DR 80 news site's dead archive page? For a comment link, usually yes. You want a page people still read. The domain number tells you about the domain, not about that page.

Does the website field in a comment form still work? Yes, and it's the right place for your link. It's nofollow almost every time. It's also the one spot moderators expect a link, so it doesn't count against you.

Where to go next

If you want the shortest path from here: pick five strong dofollow listings for your category, then add one hour a week of comments on pages that still have readers.

For the listings, start with high-DR sites and narrow by what you built. Content and blogging platforms are the easiest dofollow wins for most people, and dev communities are worth it if your users are technical. For the comment side, our comment link list is the page we built for exactly this.