Do you have a dilemma about disavowing no-follow links?
There are contradictory opinions about this and none of the theories is 100% confirmed.
One option is that disavowing no-follow links is not necessary, as they won't do any harm because they don't influence rankings or penalties.
The other opinion is that no-follow links can also be spammy and since Google adds a lot of weight on user experience, any type of spammy links can harm your site, follow or no-follow.
The fact is also that most people consider that by disavowing links Google does nothing else but adds a no-follow tag to these links in their database.
As there is no 100% confirmed answer from Google about this, we always recommend disavowing no-follow links too. This way we are safer. Even if they don't have to be disavowed because they don't have an impact on rankings, we don't do any harm to the site as the site wouldn't benefit much from them in the first place. On the other side, no-follow links can be obviously unnatural and by disavowing them, we reduce the potential risk without harming the site in the long run.
Without clear confirmation from Google about that dilemma, we recommend playing safe. For example, we ran numerous tests with no-follow links and some of the tests showed signs that they can affect rankings too, especially if they are placed on sites with high authority and relevancy (positive effect), or if they are extremely spammy (negative effect).
