A nofollow link is a hyperlink carrying rel="nofollow" (or, since 2019, the more specific rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc"), a signal telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through that particular link. Google introduced the attribute in 2005 to fight comment-spam link schemes, and it's since become one of the most commonly misapplied pieces of HTML in SEO - added where it shouldn't be, and left off where it should.
What It Actually Does
Historically, nofollow meant "don't follow this link at all, and don't pass any ranking value through it." Since 2019, Google treats it as a hint rather than a strict directive - it may still crawl and consider a nofollowed link for discovery purposes, but it still won't pass the same ranking credit a normal link would. The three current values each signal something slightly different:
rel="nofollow"- general-purpose, don't-vouch-for-this-link.rel="sponsored"- specifically for paid or advertising links, required to stay compliant with Google's guidelines on paid links.rel="ugc"- specifically for user-generated content, like blog comments or forum posts you don't control.
A link can carry more than one value at once (rel="ugc nofollow" is valid and common on comment sections).
When to Use Nofollow
- Paid links, sponsorships, and affiliate links - required by Google's guidelines; failing to mark paid links can be treated as a manipulative link scheme.
- User-generated content you don't vet, like blog comments and forum posts, where you can't vouch for the destination.
- Links to pages you don't want associated with your site's endorsement - login pages, internal search results, or low-value utility pages that don't need to pass or receive ranking signal.
When Not to Use It (the Mistake That Actually Costs You Rankings)
Don't add rel="nofollow" to your own internal links. This is the single most common misuse on small business sites, usually introduced by an SEO plugin's default settings or a well-meaning but mistaken attempt to "save crawl budget." Nofollowing your own navigation, footer, or in-content links does the opposite of what you want: it blocks the flow of ranking credit between your own pages, which is exactly the internal signal you're trying to build.
How to Check What You're Actually Doing
- View source on a handful of key pages (not just DevTools' inspected DOM) and search for
rel="nofollow"- check whether it's appearing on internal links by accident. - Check your SEO plugin's default settings if you're on WordPress or a similar CMS - some default to nofollowing certain link types (like tag or category archive links) without it being obvious from the admin screen.
- Audit outbound paid or affiliate links to confirm they're correctly marked
sponsoredrather than left as plain, unmarked links - a compliance issue as much as an SEO one.
Common Questions
Does a nofollow link ever pass any SEO value? Since Google's 2019 change, nofollow is a hint rather than a strict block - Google may still crawl and index the linked page, and can choose to count the link as a ranking signal in aggregate across many links, but you should not rely on it to pass credit deliberately.
Should affiliate links be nofollow? Yes, marked as rel="sponsored" specifically, not the general-purpose nofollow value - see the three current values above.
Is nofollow the same as noindex? No. nofollow is a link-level attribute about whether to pass ranking credit through one specific link; noindex is a page-level directive about whether a page can appear in search results at all. See our noindex tag guide for the latter.
The Fast Way to Check Yours
Checking rel attributes across every link on a site by hand doesn't scale past a handful of pages - view-source and a find-in-page search is the practical way to spot-check one at a time. For the wider technical fundamentals a nofollow mistake often sits alongside - crawlability, canonical tags, structured data - AuditCrow's free scan covers those, and our technical SEO checklist has the rest.