What Is a Nofollow Link?

A nofollow link is a hyperlink with the rel="nofollow" attribute added to its <a> tag. It tells search engines not to pass ranking credit — often called PageRank or link equity — to the page it points to. You're linking, but not vouching.

Google introduced nofollow in 2005 to fight comment spam. In 2019 it added two related attributes, rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc", to cover paid links and user-generated content specifically. Since March 2020, all three are treated as hints rather than hard rules: Google usually honours them, but can choose not to.

Check your site now: Run a free audit on the RankNibbler homepage to instantly see how many of your outbound links are nofollow, sponsored, or UGC, and spot internal links that are accidentally nofollowed.

What a Nofollow Link Looks Like

In HTML, a nofollow link looks identical to a normal link except for the rel attribute:

<!-- A normal "follow" link -->
<a href="https://example.com/">Example</a>

<!-- A nofollow link -->
<a href="https://example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example</a>

<!-- Stacking rel values is allowed and common -->
<a href="https://example.com/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Example</a>

rel only applies to the link it's on — there's no site-wide nofollow switch in HTML. A <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> tag in the <head> does apply to every link on a page, but that's rarely what you want (more on that below).

Nofollow vs Sponsored vs UGC

Use nofollow for generic links you don't want to vouch for. The other two attributes, added by Google in 2019, cover specific cases:

Attribute	When to use	Passes PageRank?	Required by Google?
`rel="nofollow"`	Generic "don't vouch" — untrusted, low-quality, or editorially neutral links	No (hint)	No, but strongly recommended in the right contexts
`rel="sponsored"`	Any paid link: ads, affiliate links, sponsored reviews, paid placements	No (hint)	Yes — Google explicitly requires disclosure of paid links
`rel="ugc"`	Comments, forum posts, wiki edits, tweets embedded as links, etc.	No (hint)	No, but recommended for platforms that allow user submissions
No rel attribute	Editorial links — your own writing recommending a resource	Yes (full equity)	N/A — this is the default

Values can be stacked when more than one applies — a paid link inside a forum post could carry rel="sponsored ugc".

When to Use Nofollow

Paid or affiliate links — use rel="sponsored". Google requires this for anything you were compensated for; skipping it risks a manual action.
User-generated content — use rel="ugc" for comments, forum posts, and reviews written by someone other than you or your editorial team.
Untrusted third-party links — use rel="nofollow" for sources you can't fully vouch for, like an archived page you're not sure will stay clean.
Utility URLs — login, cart, and account pages add no SEO value. Nofollow them, or better, block them entirely in robots.txt.

When Not to Use It

Don't nofollow your own internal links — every one you nofollow throws PageRank away instead of passing it elsewhere on your site. This includes the old idea of "PageRank sculpting" (nofollowing minor pages to concentrate authority on money pages): Google confirmed in 2009 that it hasn't worked since 2008 — nofollowed PageRank evaporates rather than redistributing to your other links.

"If you nofollow a link on your site, those links don't pass PageRank — and that PageRank doesn't flow anywhere else either." — Matt Cutts, Google

The same goes for genuine editorial outbound links and citations. Linking to authoritative sources is part of what makes your own content trustworthy — don't nofollow everything out of a misplaced worry about "losing" equity.

Nofollow vs Noindex vs Disallow

These three get confused often, but they solve different problems and aren't interchangeable.

Mechanism	Effect	Common use
`rel="nofollow"` on a link	Tells Google not to follow or endorse that specific link	Paid, UGC, untrusted links
`<meta name="robots" content="noindex">`	Tells Google not to include the page in the index (but will still crawl it)	Thin pages, thank-you pages, internal search results
`Disallow:` in robots.txt	Tells Google not to crawl the URL at all	Staging environments, private admin URLs, parameter noise
HTTP `401/403/404/410`	Tells Google the URL is gone, private, or forbidden	Removed content, access-controlled resources

Key gotcha: never Disallow: a URL in robots.txt and rely on noindex on that URL. If Google cannot crawl the page, it cannot see the noindex tag, and the URL can still appear in search results with no snippet.

Does Nofollow Stop Indexing?

No, and this is a common mix-up. Since March 2020, nofollow is a hint: Google can still crawl, index, or occasionally credit a nofollowed link if its systems decide that's the better outcome. Nofollow applies to the link, not the destination — Google can discover and index that page through a sitemap, a different link elsewhere on the web, or any other route. If you actually want to keep a page out of the index, use noindex on the page itself.

Whole-Page and Header-Level Nofollow

You can nofollow every link on a page at once with a meta tag, or apply it at the HTTP level for non-HTML files like PDFs:

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

X-Robots-Tag: nofollow

This is rarely the right tool for ordinary HTML pages — reasonable uses are internal search-results pages and staging URLs. For PDFs and other binaries, the header set at your server or CDN is the only way to apply it.

Do Nofollow Links Help SEO?

Officially, no — they don't pass PageRank. In practice, they're still worth earning:

They drive real referral traffic, often better-targeted than organic search.
A natural backlink profile mixes follow and nofollow; 100% follow links looks manipulated.
Since nofollow is only a hint, Google sometimes credits it anyway.

Good places to earn them: Reddit, Quora, active forums, news comment sections, and high-authority directories.

Common Mistakes

Nofollowing every external link by default through a CMS plugin — it kills your editorial link profile.
Forgetting to mark affiliate links sponsored — a common trigger for manual actions.
Nofollowing category or tag pages that are part of your normal site architecture.
Confusing rel="noopener" (a security attribute) with rel="nofollow" (a crawl directive) — they're unrelated.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do nofollow links pass any SEO value?

Officially, no — nofollow blocks PageRank. In practice, sometimes yes: Google treats it as a hint and can choose to count it anyway, and even when it doesn't, the referral traffic and brand exposure still help indirectly.

Does nofollow stop a page from being indexed?

No. Nofollow only affects the link, not the destination. Google can still discover and index that page through another route. Use noindex on the page itself if you want to keep it out of the index.

Will Google penalise me for not disclosing a paid link?

Yes. Undisclosed paid links violate Google's link spam policy, and consequences range from the link being ignored to a site-wide manual action.

Does Google recommend nofollow for internal navigation?

No. Google has said repeatedly that nofollowing your own internal links is almost never the right call. If you want to limit crawling of certain URLs, use robots.txt instead.

How do I check if a link is nofollow?

Right-click the link, choose Inspect, and look at the anchor's rel attribute. Or run the page through the RankNibbler audit tool to see every link's rel value at once.

Quick Decision Tree

Were you paid for the link? → rel="sponsored"
Did a user post it — comment, forum, review? → rel="ugc"
Is it internal, or a source you genuinely recommend? → no rel attribute
Linking for reference but can't vouch for it? → rel="nofollow"
Is it a utility URL — login, cart, admin? → block it in robots.txt instead

Run a nofollow audit now: Paste any URL into the RankNibbler homepage and we will instantly break down every outbound link by rel attribute, flag internal nofollows, and check your paid-link disclosure at scale.

Last updated: August 2026