Nofollow Links on a SaaS Site: When to Use Them and When to Stop Caring

Nofollow links are links carrying rel="nofollow", a label telling Google you don't want your site associated with the destination or the destination crawled from your page, and a SaaS team needs to make two separate decisions about them: which attribute to put on links it publishes, and how much to value the ones it earns. Those decisions get tangled together constantly, which is how a team ends up nofollowing every outbound link on its blog while also rejecting a useful mention because a tool flagged it.

Say you run a 25-person SaaS selling help desk software to ecommerce brands. You publish a blog, host a community forum, pay for a few sponsorships, and appear in plenty of roundups. Every one of those surfaces involves a link decision, so that company will carry through the examples below.

What each link attribute means

Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links defines three values. sponsored is for ads and paid placements. ugc is for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. nofollow is for cases where neither of the others fits and you don't want Google associating your site with the page or crawling it from your link.

A "dofollow" link is simply a normal link with none of these values. No rel="dofollow" value appears in Google's list, so adding one does nothing useful, and any plugin or brief asking for it is working from folklore. Values can be combined, such as rel="ugc nofollow", and Google accepts spaces or commas between them. Older paid links marked only nofollow remain acceptable, though Google says it prefers sponsored for those.

Google's wording is also worth reading closely. Links with these attributes "will generally not be followed," and the destination can still be crawled if Google finds it through sitemaps or other sites. So an attribute is a label on one link, and it is a poor way to keep a page out of search.

Which attribute to use on your own site

The help desk company's decisions are mostly mechanical once the categories are clear.

Blog citations should stay as plain links. Google's link best practices say linking out can build trust, for example when citing sources, and advise using nofollow only for sources you don't trust. A blanket rule that nofollows all external links, still common in older CMS setups, gets this backwards. If you wouldn't vouch for a source, the better question is whether you should cite it at all.

Sponsored content, affiliate links and paid partner placements get sponsored. Your own affiliate program deserves particular attention, since partners linking to you with tracking parameters are placing paid links too, and your partner terms should tell them how to mark those.

Forum and community posts get ugc, because the help desk company can't vouch for what every member posts. Google allows removing the attribute for members with a sustained record of quality contributions, which suits a small community with named experts better than a large open one, where the moderation cost usually isn't worth it.

Internal links are the common error. Teams nofollow links to login, signup or pricing pages out of an old belief that it conserves ranking value. Google's advice for pages on your own site is a robots.txt disallow rule when you don't want them crawled, and most SaaS signup pages don't need even that. Use a noindex on pages you want kept out of results, and remember Google has to crawl the page to see it.

How to value the links you earn

Most nofollow anxiety comes from backlink reports, where a column marks each link as follow or nofollow and invites you to discount half of them. Whether a nofollow link passes any ranking value is something Google doesn't spell out on these pages, so treat confident claims in either direction with suspicion, including tools that assign a precise number.

A more useful test is what the link does for the business. Say the help desk company gets a nofollow mention in a trade publication's guide to support tools for online retailers. Buyers read that guide, some click, and the brand now appears on a page ranking for a query it cares about. Refusing that placement because of the attribute would be silly. Compare a followed link from an unrelated directory, which sends nobody and tells a reader nothing. On the question of which backlinks help a SaaS site, relevance and real readers are the better filter.

Attribute does matter in one narrow way: when you plan link building and report on it. If your link building metrics lump everything together, you can't tell whether outreach is earning editorial links. Track followed and qualified links separately for that purpose, then judge placements by audience and fit.

Be careful with Search Console here as well. Its Links report doesn't specify whether a link is nofollow and shows only a sample, so you need to check the page's HTML or use a third-party crawler to see the attribute.

Where the attribute becomes a compliance issue

Buying links for ranking purposes is listed as link spam in Google's spam policies, and so is exchanging goods or services for links. The same page says links qualified with nofollow or sponsored aren't a violation. That gives a clean rule for the help desk company: sponsorships are fine, and paid placements are fine, provided the link says what it is.

Trouble tends to show up in softer arrangements. Free accounts given to a blogger in return for a review link count as an exchange of goods or services. So does an agency package promising a guaranteed number of followed links on partner sites, which is one of the things to check before hiring a link building service. When a vendor insists a paid link must be followed to be worth anything, you are being sold the exact risk the policy describes.

The same logic covers guest posts for link building. A publication's own policy may nofollow contributor links. That is its call, and the article can still be worth writing if its readers are your buyers.

What changes for AI search

Google's documentation on AI features in Search says no special optimizations or extra technical requirements apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and nothing there singles out link attributes. OpenAI's crawler documentation covers which bots access sites, and it doesn't describe how a link's attribute is weighed in ChatGPT answers. So the honest position is that nobody outside those companies can confirm how rel values affect AI citations, and anyone selling a precise answer is guessing.

What you can reason about is the visible content. An assistant reading the trade publication's guide reads the sentence naming your product, regardless of what the link markup says. That makes nofollow mentions on well-read pages worth having, along with unlinked brand mentions, as part of a broader off-page program. Log whether those pages appear when you ask assistants about your category, and treat the result as an observation to keep testing, since answers vary from one query to the next.

A quick audit worth running

Crawl your site and export every external link with its rel value, then sort by template. You are looking for three patterns: a sitewide rule forcing nofollow on blog citations, paid or affiliate links with no qualifier, and forum links with no ugc. Then check internal links for stray nofollows, especially in navigation and footers. Fix them at the template level, and re-crawl afterward to confirm the HTML changed in production, because CMS plugins and rich-text editors sometimes rewrite these attributes on publish.

Labels are a small piece of link work, and we handle them as part of managed SEO for B2B SaaS companies.