Member Avatar for DanielKeith

Do no-follow backlinks from Quora and Pinterest help with SEO?

  • 3 Contributors
  • 4 Replies
  • 516 Views
  • 2 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Dani

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer for elKeith: yes — but almost entirely indirect. Links you get from Quora and Pinterest are normally user-generated/no‑follow-type links and won’t reliably pass traditional PageRank. Google announced that rel="nofollow", rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored" are treated as “hints” (announcement Sept 2019; nofollow became a crawling/indexing hint on March 1, 2020), so those links can sometimes be used for discovery or as part of broader signals — but they shouldn’t be treated as primary SEO currency. (developers.google.com)

On Quora: outbound links are generally non‑editorial and often hidden from common crawlers (so they show up inconsistently in backlink tools). Quora is useful for discovery, targeted referral traffic and for getting your content noticed — which can indirectly earn true editorial (follow) links elsewhere — but don’t expect direct PageRank from the raw Quora link itself. Practical tactic: answer fully, add one contextual link, and track clicks rather than rank movement. (ahrefs.com)

On Pinterest (and most social platforms): external links are treated similarly — the main value is referral traffic, brand/visual discovery, and virality that can trigger coverage on other sites. Optimize pins and destination pages (good images, descriptive copy, correct meta for sharing) to maximize that indirect value. (searchenginejournal.com)

Quick, actionable checklist:

  • Treat Quora/Pinterest as referral/brand channels, not primary link builders; measure sessions and conversions from referrals.
  • Contribute high-value content (no link dropping); one helpful contextual link works better than lots of self-promotion.
  • Use the new rel values if you run UGC or sponsored placements on your own site (rel="ugc" / rel="sponsored" or keep rel="nofollow" for backward compatibility). (developers.google.com)

This expands on ’s and ’s points: they’re worth having in a natural, traffic-focused strategy, but not a reliable source of direct ranking credit on their own.

Recommended Answers

All 4 Replies

Member Avatar for Dani

The article that rproffitt linked to on SEMrush seems to indicate that the only use case for nofollow links are paid ads. That's simply not true. Nofollow was Google's recommended method anytime you were linking to content that you could not vouch for. While paid ads definitely fell under that category, so did links within user generated content, such as forums. All of the links within member posts have always been nofollow'ed.

As pointed out in that article, lots and lots of links on the web have been nofollow'ed, and Google still looked at them, sometimes.

Well, now it's official. Google has announced last month that the nofollow attribute will now be seen only as a hint. Of course, many SEOs have suspected this for quite some time, but it's now not only officially on the record, but Google is actually encouraging two additional link attributes to replace nofollow as well. In an effort to better understand a website's motives for using nofollow, they are adding two additional link attributes, ugc for user-generated content, and sponsored for paid ads. The original nofollow is now a catchall to be used when you don't necessarily vouch for or trust the content you're linking to, but it doesn't fall into either of the other two categories. It's now at Google's discretion whether and to what extent they will count that as a backlink within their rankings.

More information at https://searchengineland.com/google-to-treat-nofollow-link-attribute-as-a-hint-after-march-1-2020-321664

commented: In 30 days everyone is out of date on almost any Google subject? +15
Member Avatar for Dani

In 30 days everyone is out of date on almost any Google subject?

For sure!! SEO is an incredibly fast-paced industry. That's why there are so many questions such as, "What's the best method for <blah> in 2019?" and "What's the best method for <blah> in October 2019?" with the same question asked every few months. Because the answer can be very different!

Edited by Dani
Member Avatar for Dani

There are over 300 Google algorithms released every year, meaning there's an algorithm change almost every day. Of those, there are about two a month that are impactful enough to be announced by Google to the SEO community. The SEO community then scurries to make changes. Rinse and repeat.

commented: This is an great summation of what we all suspected. +0
Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.