Nofollow link

What Google says nofollow does

Google asks site owners to use nofollow "when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site". Links with these attributes "will generally not be followed", but the pages they point to "may still be crawled" if Google finds them through sitemaps or links from other sites (Qualify your outbound links to Google).

For pages on your own site, nofollow is the wrong tool: Google points to the robots.txt disallow rule to stop crawling, and to the noindex rule to keep a page out of its index.

A hint, not a directive, since 2019

Nofollow dates from 2005, when it was introduced to fight comment spam. In September 2019 Google announced two new attributes and changed the rules: nofollow, sponsored and ugc are now all treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search, used along with other signals. For crawling and indexing, nofollow became a hint on 1 March 2020 (Google Search Central blog, September 2019).

Google gave its reason in the same post: "Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns." A nofollow link can therefore still be seen, crawled and used as a signal; what it asks is that the link not count as an endorsement.

rel=sponsored and rel=ugc

rel="sponsored" marks "advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links)". Nofollow "is still an acceptable way to flag them, though sponsored is preferred". rel="ugc" is for "user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts". Values can be combined, for example rel="ugc nofollow" (Google).

Qualifying paid links is what keeps them within the rules. Google's spam policies say buying and selling links is "a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes", and not a violation "as long as they are qualified" with nofollow or sponsored (Spam policies for Google web search). Marking a link sponsored by mistake costs little: Google says the most it would do is not count that link as a credit for the other page.

What a dofollow link is

"Dofollow" is SEO shorthand for a plain link. In Google's words, "for regular links that you expect Google to fetch and parse without any qualifications, you don't need to add a rel attribute" (Google). Those are the links that can pass ranking credit, which is exactly why a paid one has to be qualified. A natural profile mixes both kinds; see follow vs nofollow links.

How common nofollow links are

When Ahrefs studied the backlinks of the top 110,000 sites in 2020, 10.6% were nofollow. The two newer values were rare: rel="ugc" appeared on 0.44% of referring domains and rel="sponsored" on 0.01%. Ahrefs also found large sites such as Wikipedia, Forbes, Entrepreneur, CNN and NFL using mostly nofollow on external links (Ahrefs, May 2020).

Practitioners still value them. In Authority Hacker's survey, 89.1% of 755 link builders said nofollow links have an impact on rankings (Authority Hacker), and in Semrush's 2025 study of 1,000 domains, nofollow links correlated with mentions in AI answers almost exactly as follow links did, 0.340 against 0.334 (Semrush).

How to check whether a link is nofollow

Inspect the link in your browser and read its rel attribute. Google Search Console's Links report will not tell you: it "doesn't specify if a link is marked as nofollow" (Links report, Search Console Help). The free link checker reads the attribute for any URL.