Nofollow

What Is Nofollow?

The Nofollow attribute is an important tool for managing your link profile. It marks links as untrusted or paid — such as advertising links, user-generated content, or affiliate links. Since 2019, Google has treated nofollow as a hint rather than a strict directive, which has changed the strategic importance of the attribute.

Nofollow is a link attribute (rel=“nofollow”) that instructs search engines not to pass ranking power (Link Juice) through the link. A nofollow link has no direct influence on the ranking of the target page from an SEO perspective, while follow links (the default) pass trust and authority signals. The attribute was introduced by Google in 2005 to combat spam in comment sections and user-generated content.

Technically, Google implements the Nofollow attribute by ignoring these links during page analysis and not including them in PageRank’s link analysis. Google still crawls such links and can discover new content through them, but doesn’t follow them for ranking purposes. In addition to rel=“nofollow,” there are now also rel=“sponsored” (for paid links) and rel=“ugc” (for user-generated content). This distinction helps Google better understand the type and context of a link.

In practice, website owners should use Nofollow strategically: for outbound links to untrustworthy sites, affiliate links, paid links, and in comment sections. However, you shouldn’t mark all outbound links as Nofollow — some follow links to high-quality, relevant pages signal expertise and trustworthiness. A natural link profile with a mix of follow and nofollow links appears more authentic than only nofollow links.