Nofollow link

A nofollow link is an ordinary link carrying an attribute that asks search engines not to pass ranking credit to whatever it points at. The link works normally for people. They click it and arrive. The instruction is addressed to machines, and it exists because the ability to create a link somewhere and be rewarded for it was being abused within about a year of anyone noticing links mattered.

In short

• A link marked so it does not pass ranking credit.
• Since 2020 Google treats the marking as a hint, not an order.
• Required on anything paid for, gifted or exchanged.
• Still worth having, because real people still click it.

Where it came from and what changed

The attribute arrived in 2005 as a blunt response to comment spam. If every link in a comment section passed credit, then flooding comment sections was a viable strategy, and it duly became one. Marking those links removed the incentive.

For fifteen years it functioned as an instruction. Google would not follow the link, full stop.

That changed on the first of March 2020. Nofollow became a hint, and not only for ranking: Google now treats it as a hint for crawling and indexing as well, which means it reads the marking, usually respects it, and reserves the right to decide otherwise. The reasoning was practical rather than generous: enormous quantities of the web were marked nofollow by default, including most of the places where genuine editorial recommendation happens, and discarding all of it was throwing away real information.

The consequence for a business is small but worth knowing. A nofollowed link from somewhere reputable is no longer definitively worthless. It is simply not something to count on.

The two newer labels

Alongside that change came finer distinctions, and using the right one is better than defaulting to nofollow for everything.

• sponsored. Anything where money or goods changed hands. Advertising, paid placements, affiliate links, gifted products.
• ugc. Links inside content your visitors created. Comments, reviews, forum posts.
• nofollow. Everything else you do not wish to endorse, and still a valid catch-all.

More than one can be applied to a single link. Nobody will penalise you for using nofollow where sponsored would have been more precise, but the precise version tells Google something true rather than something vague.

The obligation nobody reads about

This is the part that matters commercially, and it is the part most often skipped. If you pay somebody to write about your business and the link is not marked, both of you are participating in what Google classifies as a link scheme. The same applies to gifted products, discounts in exchange for coverage, and affiliate arrangements. The exchange does not have to be cash.

It comes up constantly in influencer marketing, where the person writing has no reason to know the rule and the business commissioning the work assumes the platform handles it. Asking for the link to carry a sponsored attribute costs nothing at the point of agreeing the work and is awkward to request afterwards.

Marking it does not devalue the placement. You were buying the audience, not the link.

What it is not

Nofollow and noindex sound similar and do unrelated things. Nofollow is an attribute on a link, concerning what credit flows along it. Noindex is an instruction on a page, concerning whether that page appears in search results at all. One is about the road, the other is about the destination. Applying nofollow to every link pointing at a page will not keep the page out of Google, because Google can reach it a dozen other ways.

There was also once a technique of nofollowing your own internal links to concentrate value on the pages that mattered. It was popular and it was clever, and it has not worked for a very long time. The arithmetic now divides a page’s value across every outgoing link including the nofollowed ones, and the share assigned to a nofollowed link is discarded rather than handed to its neighbours. Sculpting therefore does not redirect value, it destroys a portion of it, which is worse than the failure most people imagine. Google made the change around 2008 and Matt Cutts explained it publicly in 2009. Anybody still recommending it is working from a very old book.

Words you will hear

• rel. The attribute on a link that carries these values.
• dofollow. Not a real attribute. Just an informal name for an ordinary link with nothing applied.
• Link scheme. Google’s term for arrangements that trade in links. Unmarked paid links are the common example.
• Link equity. The value passing along a link. Also called link juice by people who have been doing this a long time.
• Editorial link. One somebody chose to give you because the thing was worth linking to. The only kind that reliably counts, and the subject of off-page SEO.

How to think about it

Stop sorting links into valuable and worthless by attribute. The more useful question is whether the placement puts you in front of people who might become customers, and whether it exists because somebody thought you were worth mentioning.

A followed link from a site nobody reads is worth less than a nofollowed mention in a publication your customers actually open. The attribute is the least interesting thing about any given backlink, which is roughly the opposite of how it gets discussed.