Nofollow links still have value.

Nofollow stopped being an off switch

When the attribute arrived it was an instruction: do not pass authority through this link, full stop. In 2019 Google changed that, and nofollow, along with the newer sponsored and ugc attributes, became a hint. Google now decides for itself whether to use the link as a signal rather than obeying the tag absolutely. That does not mean every nofollow link is quietly counted, and you should not assume it is. It does mean the binary worthless-or-valuable model the dismissal rests on is simply not how the system works any more.

So the confident claim that a nofollow link "does nothing" is asserting knowledge of an internal decision nobody outside Google has. The honest position is that you do not know whether a given nofollow link passed any authority, and that uncertainty is a much weaker reason to refuse a placement than people treat it as.

Authority was never the only thing a link did

Fix the attribute question aside and look at what a good link actually does, and most of it has nothing to do with the tag. A link from a real publication sends real people, and referral traffic that converts does not care whether the link was followed. It puts your name in front of an audience that did not know you, which is brand, and brand is what makes people search for you by name later. It gets your page discovered and crawled. And it sits in a profile that a human, or a journalist, or a potential client actually reads.

None of that is switched off by an attribute. A big nofollow mention in a title people trust is worth more, on every measure that pays your invoices, than a followed link from a site nobody reads. That is the whole logic of earning coverage: you are after the mention, the audience and the credibility, and the follow status is a detail you often cannot control and should not be filtering on.

Where the distinction does matter

This is not a case for ignoring the attribute entirely. If you are paying for a placement, it must be marked sponsored or nofollow, because a paid followed link is a link scheme and buys you risk rather than authority. And if your entire strategy depended on one big followed link that turned out nofollow, the problem is the single-point strategy, not the tag. Used as a compliance and risk signal, the attribute is meaningful. Used as a filter for which honest coverage is worth having, it is leading you to turn down the good stuff.

The right unit of decision is the placement, not the attribute: is this a real audience on a site that matters, reached with something worth saying. If yes, take it, follow or not. If you are trying to move authority specifically, that is earned through the merits across a mix of placements, not by screening a link list for a single character in the markup.

The general lesson

Optimising for a single attribute is a smaller game than the one actually worth playing. A link is a relationship between two pages and the people who move between them, and the value of that is mostly in the audience, the credibility and the discovery, none of which a nofollow tag removes. Chase coverage that is genuinely worth having and let the attributes fall where they fall, because the profile that results will be both more useful and more believable than one filtered down to followed links alone.