Nofollow Link

A nofollow link is an ordinary hyperlink with one extra instruction attached: the attribute rel="nofollow". That attribute tells search engines not to pass ranking credit — often called link equity or PageRank — from your page through the link to its destination. A normal link is, in effect, a vote of confidence; search engines have long treated a link from one page to another as a signal that the first page trusts and endorses the second. The nofollow attribute lets you place a link while explicitly declining to cast that vote. The link still works perfectly for a human visitor, who clicks it and lands on the destination as usual. What changes is only the signal sent to the engine: this link should not be read as my endorsement, so do not credit the target for it.

Google introduced nofollow in 2005, chiefly to fight comment spam — people were dropping links in blog comments and forums purely to inflate their own rankings. Marking user-submitted links nofollow removed the incentive. The attribute later became the correct way to handle paid and sponsored links, which must not pass ranking credit under search-engine guidelines, since a link you were paid to place is not an honest editorial vote. In 2019 Google refined the system, introducing rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content, and announced that it would treat all three as hints rather than strict directives. That last change matters: nofollow now suggests, rather than guarantees, that no credit flows.

The natural contrast is with a dofollow link, which is simply a normal link carrying no nofollow attribute. "Dofollow" is not a real attribute you write into HTML — it is just shorthand for the default behavior, a link that does pass ranking credit. Every link is dofollow unless you mark it otherwise. So the choice is not between two attributes but between adding the nofollow instruction or leaving it off. Within the nofollow family, Google's 2019 update added two more specific values. The rel="sponsored" value labels links that are advertisements or paid placements. The rel="ugc" value labels links in user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. Plain rel="nofollow" remains the catch-all for any link you do not want to endorse but that fits neither paid nor user-generated.

Knowing which to use keeps a site on the right side of the guidelines. A paid review, an affiliate link, or a banner ad should be marked sponsored, because passing credit for a link you were paid to place is exactly what search engines forbid. Links your users add — blog comments, forum signatures, profile fields — belong in the ugc bucket, or at least nofollow, because you cannot vouch for what strangers link to. A link to a page you simply do not want to endorse, perhaps a source you are citing critically, can take plain nofollow. The contrast with dofollow is the strategic one: every dofollow link you place passes some of your page's strength to the destination, so editorial dofollow links are how you deliberately lend authority, and nofollow is how you withhold it.

Use nofollow, sponsored, and ugc deliberately, not reflexively. Mark every paid or sponsored link with rel="sponsored" (or nofollow), because failing to do so on links you were compensated for can be treated as a manipulative scheme and can draw a penalty. Apply rel="ugc" or nofollow to links your users contribute, so spam in your comments does not become your endorsement. And reserve plain nofollow for genuine links you do not wish to vouch for. For the links that represent your real editorial judgment — citing a trusted source, pointing to your own related pages, recommending a tool you stand behind — leave them as normal dofollow links, because that is how you pass deserved credit and build the web of trust search engines reward.

The mistakes run in both directions. Over-nofollowing — marking your own internal links or your honest editorial citations nofollow — needlessly withholds credit and can flatten how authority flows through your own site, since internal links are how you signal which pages matter. Under-nofollowing the opposite risk: leaving paid or sponsored links as dofollow violates the guidelines and invites a penalty. A third error is treating nofollow as a security or privacy control, which it is not — it governs ranking credit only, not whether a link can be clicked or crawled. The discipline is to match the attribute to the link's true nature: sponsored for paid, ugc for user-submitted, nofollow for unendorsed, and plain dofollow for the editorial links you genuinely mean.

Nofollow link — a link with the rel=nofollow attribute — tells search engines not to pass ranking credit to the destination, the standard way to link to paid, untrusted, or user-generated pages.

Etymology: source.

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