nofollow
Definition
A nofollow link is an ordinary anchor element carrying rel="nofollow". Google, Yahoo and MSN introduced the value jointly in January 2005 as a way to make blog comment spam pointless: if the link passed no credit, there was nothing to gain by posting it. In September 2019 Google added two more specific values, rel="sponsored" for paid or affiliate links and rel="ugc" for links in user-generated content such as comments and forum posts, and from 1 March 2020 it began treating all three as hints it may consider rather than directives it must obey. The value belongs to one link. It is distinct from the nofollow directive in the robots meta tag, which applies to every link on the page at once.
Why It Matters
The practical uses are narrow and worth knowing precisely. Paid placements, affiliate links and advertisements should be marked sponsored, because passing ranking credit through a paid link is a link scheme in Google's terms and is the sort of thing that attracts a manual action. Anything a stranger can post on your site — comments, profile fields, forum threads — is safer marked ugc, since you did not choose those destinations. What nofollow is not is a crawl control: Google has stated plainly that nofollowed URLs may still be crawled and that the attribute does not conserve crawl budget. And it costs you nothing to receive one, because a nofollowed backlink still carries readers, who were always the point.
How It Works
The crawler reads the rel attribute along with the href and records the values. Historically a nofollow removed the link from ranking calculations entirely; under the hint model the engine decides for itself, which lets it use a nofollowed link as one signal among many without treating it as an endorsement. Multiple values can sit in the same attribute separated by spaces, so rel="ugc nofollow" is valid and unambiguous. The values have no effect on the browser or the reader: a nofollow link looks, behaves and clicks exactly like any other. An old habit called PageRank sculpting tried to steer internal authority by nofollowing some internal links; Google changed how that arithmetic works in 2009 and it has not been useful since.
Real-World Example
A small community site hosts a resources page as a static file at riverside-links.99helpers.site, listing thirty member-submitted addresses. The maintainer cannot vouch for any of them and adds rel="ugc nofollow" to each link. The page keeps its usefulness, the links keep working for readers, and nothing on the page reads as an endorsement the maintainer never made. The equivalent change on an unmarked page would have been a manual pass through thirty anchor tags.
Common Mistakes
- ✕Using nofollow to stop a URL being crawled — it was never a crawl directive, and Google has said nofollowed URLs may be fetched anyway
- ✕Marking every outbound link nofollow — ordinary editorial links to sources are exactly what the attribute is not for
- ✕Leaving paid and affiliate links unmarked — those want a sponsored rel value, and unmarked paid links are treated as a link scheme
- ✕Treating a nofollowed inbound link as worthless — it still sends real visitors, and since 2020 it may count for ranking anyway
Related Terms
Backlink
A backlink is a link on someone else's site that points at yours. Search engines read it both as a route to your page and as a small vote of confidence in it.
Robots Meta Tag
The robots meta tag is a line in the head of an HTML page that tells search engines how to treat that one page. It controls indexing and display, not crawling.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link. Search engines read it as a short description of the page at the other end, written by whoever placed the link.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to fetch from one site in a given period. For most sites it is not a real constraint.
Link Sharing
Link sharing means sending someone a web address that points at your file, rather than sending a copy of the file itself. One address, one source of truth, any number of recipients.
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