Nofollow links – do search engines really not follow them?

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"Nofollow" is information directed towards search engines. It means "do not follow", do not crawl, do not index outgoing links. In the original meaning, nofollow links are invisible to search engines, so they have no meaning from an SEO perspective. However, nothing is just black and white, and especially with nofollow links, the key idea ceases to make sense.

What does a nofollow link actually look like?
The nofollow tag was created as a meta malta phone number data tag for a page. Based on this tag, search engines are not supposed to follow any outgoing links on a page. Today, it is used especially for individual links on a page as the value of the rel attribute. Example of a nofollow link:


How's the tracking going?
According to information provided by Google, nofollow links are not actually followed, or rather, the PageRank of the page on which they are placed is not transferred to them. A similar position is also publicly stated by the Czech search engine Seznam: "Nofollow prohibits following the link. In practice, the search engine robot indexes the text of the link, but does not index the page to which it is linked." /1,2/

Nofollow links in practice
According to the principles defined by Google, nofollow links should be used in three main cases.

Paid links: nofollow is intended to indicate paid links. Search engines usually view these negatively, especially if they appear to be unpaid.