Nofollow links in 2026: hints, not commands

Nofollow links are links that carry rel="nofollow", and since 2019 Google reads that value as a hint, not an instruction. It can still use a nofollow link for ranking, and since March 1, 2020 for crawling and indexing too. Two newer values sit beside it: sponsored for paid links and ugc for links that users post. This guide covers what each one does now, what it no longer does, and how to see how much of your own link profile is followed.

The change Google made in 2019

Nofollow arrived around 2005 as a tool against comment spam, and for years Google simply did not count a nofollow link as a ranking signal. In its September 10, 2019 post Evolving "nofollow", Google changed that. All three values became hints about which links to consider or exclude, weighed with other signals.

Google gave its reason in the same post. Links carry useful information, such as the words used to describe the page they point at, and seeing every link helps it spot unnatural patterns. So it stopped throwing that data away.

Three things follow for site owners:

1. A nofollow link may or may not pass credit, and nothing tells you which.
2. Nofollow is not a way to keep a page out of Google's index. Google says relying on it for that was never recommended.
3. Existing nofollow markup is fine. Google said there is no need to change it.

What each value is for

Google's guide to qualifying outbound links gives each value a job:

You can stack values in one attribute, separated by a space or a comma, as in rel="ugc nofollow". Adding nofollow next to a newer value covers services that never learned ugc or sponsored. Google also lets you drop ugc for members who have posted good material consistently over time.

The one mistake that costs something

Most mislabels are harmless. If you mark a comment link as sponsored, Google said the worst case is that it does not credit that link. The expensive error runs the other way: a paid link with no qualifier at all.

Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking as link spam, and they count payment in goods and services, including a free product given in exchange for a post with a link. The same section says paid links are fine once they carry sponsored or nofollow. Google prefers sponsored.

Page-level nofollow is a different rule

The link attribute affects one link. The robots meta tag affects every link on the page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

Google's robots meta documentation defines that nofollow as "Do not follow the links on this page", and none as shorthand for noindex, nofollow. The same rules work as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, which is how you apply them to PDFs. Only nofollow exists at page level; sponsored and ugc belong on individual links.

For links between pages of your own site, Google's guide points you to a robots.txt disallow rule rather than nofollow. And to keep a page out of results, allow crawling and add noindex. Google does not support noindex inside robots.txt.

What nofollow links still give you

• Visitors. People click them like any other link, and they show up as referrals.
• Discovery. Because the value is a hint, Google may use the link to find your page, and it can reach the page through a sitemap or other links anyway.
• Mentions. The sentence around a link that names your brand stays on the page whatever the rel says, which matters for readers and for AI answers that quote the page.

What you should not do is count them as ranking credit.

How to check your followed share

Our Backlink Finder looks up the 100 strongest sites linking to a domain, yours or a competitor's. For each one it shows a link rank from 0 to 1,000, how many links it has, when the first was seen, a spam score, and the share of its linking pages that are followed rather than nofollow. It also groups the 50 most used link texts. A run costs 70 credits. It covers the whole domain, not one page, and its counts are the data provider's estimates, so it cannot say which links Google counts.

For a quicker read on the whole profile, the Domain Overview (50 credits) reports the share of a domain's links that use nofollow alongside its rankings. Neither tool audits the rel values on your own outbound links; for that, view the page source or use your browser's element inspector.

When the old habits still make sense

Nofollow is still the right call when you link to something you don't want associated with your site and the link is neither paid nor user content. It just no longer works as a wall. Treat it as a label you give Google, and label paid links every time.