Where nofollow came from
Google introduced nofollow in 2005 to fight comment spam. Blogs added it to every link in their comments so spammers gained nothing from posting there. Over time sites started using it for any link they did not want to endorse: paid placements, user profiles, forum signatures and links to sites they distrust.
In 2019 Google added two more specific values, ugc for user generated content and sponsored for paid links, and changed nofollow from a strict directive into a hint. Google may now choose to crawl or count a nofollow link, but you should not plan on it.
Are nofollow links useless?
No. A nofollow link still sends people. A link from a busy launch platform, a popular Reddit thread or a Hacker News comment can bring hundreds of visitors in a day, and some of them write about you on their own sites, which earns dofollow links you never asked for.
A natural link profile also contains plenty of nofollow links. A site with only dofollow links, all with keyword anchors, looks engineered.
When you should use nofollow on your own site
Use sponsored for anything paid, ugc for links your users post, and nofollow for links you do not want to vouch for. Links to your own pages should stay dofollow: adding nofollow to internal links does not save crawl budget and only hides your own pages from the crawler.
Example
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow noopener">Example</a> is a nofollow link. On Aback Launch, a listing's website link carries nofollow until the founder adds our badge.
Questions people ask
- Do nofollow links help SEO?
- Indirectly. They bring visitors and brand searches, and Google may use them as a hint, but they do not pass link equity the way a dofollow link does.
- What is the difference between nofollow, ugc and sponsored?
- All three ask search engines not to treat the link as an editorial vote. Sponsored says the link was paid for, ugc says a user posted it, and nofollow covers everything else you do not want to endorse.
Related terms
- Dofollow linkA dofollow link is an ordinary HTML link with no nofollow, ugc or sponsored value in its rel attribute. Search engines can follow it and count it as a vote for the page it points to.
- UGC linkA UGC link carries rel="ugc" and marks a link that a user, not the site, put on the page, such as a link in a comment, a forum post or a public profile.
- Sponsored linkA sponsored link carries rel="sponsored" and marks a link that exists because of payment, such as an ad, an affiliate link or a paid placement.
- BacklinkA backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines use backlinks to discover your pages and as a signal of how much other sites trust them.