Nofollow links: what they do now
·4 min read
A nofollow link is a link marked rel="nofollow", which tells Google you don't vouch for the page it points to. Since September 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a command, so it may still use the link, and it added rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user content. Use sponsored on anything you were paid for, ugc on comments and forum posts, and nofollow when neither fits.
Meta robots nofollow is a separate rule that works on a whole page.
What changed with nofollow in 2019
Google stopped treating nofollow as an order. In Evolving "nofollow", published September 10, 2019, Google said all three values are hints about which links to consider or exclude in Search. For crawling and indexing, nofollow became a hint on March 1, 2020.
Two practical consequences follow. A nofollow link can now pass some credit if Google decides it should, and you have no way to see whether it did. And nofollow no longer keeps a page out of the index. To hide a page, use noindex, covered below and in our post on what noindex does.
The same post said there is no need to change nofollow links you already have. Old markup keeps working.
Rel sponsored, rel ugc and rel nofollow compared
Google's guide to qualifying outbound links gives each value one job.
| Value | Use it for | Example |
|---|---|---|
rel="sponsored" |
Ads, paid placements, affiliate and sponsored links | A paid review linking to the brand |
rel="ugc" |
Links inside user-generated content | Blog comments, forum posts |
rel="nofollow" |
Any link you don't want associated with your site when the others don't apply | A link to a page you are criticizing |
You can combine values, separated by a space or a comma:
<a href="https://example.com/" rel="ugc nofollow">their site</a>Pairing ugc with nofollow covers search engines that don't read the newer values. Google also suggests you can drop ugc for trusted regular contributors whose links you are happy to stand behind.
Getting the value slightly wrong costs little. Per the 2019 post, marking a non-ad link as sponsored at most means Google may not credit that link. The real risk is in the other direction.
When you must use rel sponsored
Any link you got paid for, in money or in kind, needs sponsored or nofollow. Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam. The same page says paid links for advertising are fine as long as they carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".
Google prefers sponsored, and nofollow is still accepted for paid links. In practice that covers:
- Sponsored posts and paid guest posts.
- Affiliate links.
- Product reviews where you got the product in exchange for coverage.
- Banner and text ads that link out.
A followed link sold "for SEO" is exactly what the policy describes.
Do nofollow links still have value?
Yes, just not the kind people used to count. A nofollow link from a busy page still sends visitors, and those clicks show up in your analytics like any other referral. Because the attribute is a hint, Google can also use the link to find your page. Its guide says a linked page may still be crawled if Google finds it another way, such as a sitemap.
For AI answers, the attribute is beside the point. The rel value describes the link. The sentence around it, the one that names your brand and says what you do, is still ordinary text on the page. Comment threads and forum posts are usually ugc-tagged, so a mention there carries no link credit, but the words are still there for anyone who reads the page. Our post on how to get mentioned by AI covers which mentions matter.
Just don't assume a nofollow link counts toward rankings.
Meta robots nofollow vs link-level rel
Link-level rel="nofollow" applies to one link. The meta robots nofollow rule applies to every link on the page:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">Google's robots meta tag documentation defines nofollow there as "Do not follow the links on this page." Without it, Google may use the page's links to discover the pages they point to. The none value is shorthand for noindex, nofollow. Only nofollow exists as a meta rule. sponsored and ugc work only on individual links.
noindex, nofollow on a page means two things at once. Keep this page out of results, and don't use its links. That suits a thank-you page or a staging copy. It is a poor default for thin pages you still link out from, because the noindex alone usually does the job, and nofollow on every internal link stops Google from using that page to reach the rest of your site. WordPress sets this pair on every page when "Discourage search engines" is ticked, which is a common cause of a site vanishing.
Never put either rule in robots.txt. Google ignores Noindex and Nofollow lines there, as our post on noindex in robots.txt explains.
See how many of your backlinks are followed
Our Backlink Finder looks up the 100 strongest sites that link to a domain, yours or a competitor's. For each site it shows the link rank from 0 to 1,000, the number of links, the date its first link was seen, a spam score, and the share of its linking pages that are followed rather than marked nofollow. It also gives a followed share across all the listed sites and the 50 most used link texts, grouped as brand name, web address, generic words, no text or other words.
It covers the whole domain, not one page, and it does not list every link. The link counts and scores are the data provider's estimates, so the tool can't tell you which links Google actually counts. A run costs 70 credits.