Nofollow, is a marker that uses the rel="nofollow" attribute in an HTML link to tell search engines, “do not follow this link or pass authority to the target page.”
Introduced in 2005 to prevent the spread of spam comments, nofollow was initially a strict directive: the search engine would ignore this link completely. Starting in 2019, Google began treating nofollow as a hint rather than a strict directive.
After 2019, three new link attributes were added:
- rel=”nofollow”: A general “do not follow” hint (default usage).
- rel=”sponsored”: For ads, sponsored content, or paid links.
- rel=”ugc”: For user-generated content (comments, forum posts).
Situations where nofollow should be used:
- Ad links (sponsored is now preferred)
- User links in comment sections (ugc is now preferred)
- External links you do not trust or cannot control
- Internal links such as login pages and user dashboards that should be kept out of crawling
Tip: Do not make all external links nofollow by default. This old “PageRank sculpting” tactic does not work, and linking to meaningful sources is beneficial for E-E-A-T.