What is a nofollow link?
A nofollow link is an ordinary hyperlink with one extra word in its code. The rel attribute on the link carries the value nofollow:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>To a visitor, a nofollow link looks and works exactly like any other link. The difference is aimed at search engines. The nofollow value says the site publishing the link is not vouching for the page it points to, so the link should not be treated as an endorsement.
The term is used loosely. "Nofollow link" usually means a link carrying rel="nofollow", but people often lump in links marked rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc" too, since all three tell search engines the link is not a plain editorial endorsement. Google itself groups the three together [5].
How does Google treat nofollow links?
Google treats a nofollow link as a hint, not a command. Google may choose to count a nofollow link when it decides how to rank pages, and may also choose to crawl and index the page the link points to [4].
That has been true in two stages:
- For ranking, nofollow became a hint on September 10, 2019, when Google announced the change [4].
- For crawling and indexing, nofollow became a hint on March 1, 2020 [4].
Before those dates, Google said it did not follow nofollow links for ranking purposes at all. Google has never published how often it uses a nofollow hint, or what makes it decide to. No outside study can measure that directly, because the signal is internal to Google. Any figure quoted for "how much a nofollow link is worth" is a guess.
Does Google still ignore nofollow links?
No. Google stopped treating nofollow as a strict rule in 2019 and may now use a nofollow link for ranking, crawling and indexing [4]. Many guides still say otherwise.
In October 2026, Search Insider read eight widely read guides to nofollow links that appear in search results for the term. Four of the eight still described nofollow links as ignored, not crawled or not followed by Google, stated as current fact. Three never mentioned the 2019 change at all. All four with the outdated description had been updated since 2023, so a recent "last updated" date on an SEO guide is no promise that its facts are current.
Two of the outdated guides lean on Google's own pre-2019 wording, that in general it did not follow nofollow links. That was accurate when Google wrote it, and it has been repeated long after Google changed the rule.
Does Bing treat nofollow the same way?
Yes, and Bing says it always has. When Google announced its change in September 2019, Bing's Fabrice Canel said Bing had always treated nofollow as a hint, making its own decision on whether to trust a link [10]. Bing added support for sponsored and ugc in 2020, also as hints, and said at the time that it weighed them less heavily than nofollow [11].
When was nofollow introduced?
Google introduced nofollow on January 18, 2005, to stop blog comment spam [1]. Since then, Google has changed what nofollow means twice: in 2019 for ranking and in 2020 for crawling, both times turning a strict rule into a hint [4].
2005: invented to fight comment spam
Nofollow was designed by Matt Cutts of Google and Jason Shellen of Blogger to tackle blog comment spam [3]. At the time, spammers left thousands of comments on blogs purely to plant links, because every link helped their rankings. Nofollow let blog software mark comment links so they earned the spammer nothing.
Other search engines adopted it. Yahoo followed nofollow links but left them out of its ranking calculations, and Microsoft's search engine (later Bing) stated in June 2008 that it respected the value [3]. Blog platforms began adding nofollow to comment links automatically, and WordPress still does this by default.
2007: Wikipedia adopts nofollow
In January 2007, English Wikipedia added nofollow to every external link in its articles, to remove the incentive to add links to Wikipedia for search rankings [6]. Many large sites with user-written content made the same choice, which is why links from forums, Q&A sites and wikis are usually nofollow today.
2009: the end of PageRank sculpting
Through the late 2000s, some SEOs used nofollow on their own internal links to steer ranking value toward their most important pages, a tactic called PageRank sculpting. In June 2009, Matt Cutts explained that Google had already changed how this worked more than a year earlier [2]. Under the change, a nofollow link still counts when a page's ranking value is divided among its links, but its share is simply lost rather than passed to the other links. Adding nofollow to internal links stopped concentrating value and started wasting it.
2019: sponsored and ugc arrive
On September 10, 2019, Google introduced two new values alongside nofollow [4]:
rel="sponsored"for links that are ads, paid placements or other compensated links.rel="ugc"for links in user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
At the same moment, Google said all three values would be treated as hints for ranking. Existing nofollow links did not need changing, and the values can be combined, such as rel="nofollow ugc" [4]. WordPress announced plans to mark comment links as ugc [3].
2020: a hint for crawling too
From March 1, 2020, Google extended the hint model to crawling and indexing [4]. Before this, Google said it would not crawl a page through a nofollow link alone. After it, Google may follow the link and index the destination.
What is the difference between nofollow and dofollow links?
A dofollow link is a full endorsement Google can use for ranking, while a nofollow link is at most a hint Google may or may not use. "Dofollow" is not a real HTML value. Nothing in a link's code says dofollow. A so-called dofollow link is simply a link without nofollow, sponsored or ugc in its rel attribute, which search engines treat as a normal, followed link.
The difference matters because a followed link is a full vote: Google can use it to judge the destination's authority.
How do you check if a link is nofollow?
To check if a link is nofollow, right-click the link in your browser and choose Inspect. If the highlighted code includes nofollow, sponsored or ugc, the link is not a plain followed link. If none of those words appear, the link is followed.
To check every link on a page at once, view the page source (right-click, then View Page Source) and search for nofollow. Browser extensions that highlight nofollow links do the same job visually.
What is the difference between nofollow, sponsored and ugc?
All three values tell Google the link is not an editorial endorsement, but they say why:
| Value | Use it for | Google's guidance |
|---|---|---|
nofollow | Links you don't want to vouch for, where the other two don't fit | Still accepted for any of these cases |
sponsored | Paid, affiliate or otherwise compensated links | Preferred value for paid links |
ugc | Links inside comments, forum posts and other user content | Preferred value for user content |
Google accepts nofollow for paid links as well, so a site that uses nofollow on ads is not doing anything wrong [5]. The newer values simply give Google more detail.
Is nofollow the same as noindex?
No. Nofollow applies to a single link, while noindex applies to a whole page. Link-level nofollow is also often confused with the meta robots nofollow tag. Here is how they differ:
- Noindex is an instruction about a page, not a link. A page with a noindex robots meta tag asks search engines to leave that page out of their results. It says nothing about the links on the page.
- Meta robots nofollow (
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">) applies nofollow to every link on a page at once, instead of one link at a time.
A link-level nofollow affects only that one link. A page can be fully indexed and still carry a mix of followed and nofollow links.
Do nofollow links help SEO?
Nofollow links help SEO indirectly, through traffic, discovery and visibility, but they do not reliably pass ranking value. They are worth having for reasons that do not depend on Google counting them:
- Referral traffic. A nofollow link sends visitors exactly like any other link.
- Discovery. Since March 2020, Google may crawl a page it finds through a nofollow link [4].
- Being found and cited. A business listed on a well-known directory or review site gets its name, details and link in front of people and the systems that read those pages, whether or not the link is followed.
- A natural profile. Real businesses pick up a mix of followed and nofollow links. A link profile that is almost entirely followed links can look manufactured.
What nofollow links do not reliably do is pass ranking value. Google may use them as a hint, but there is no published way to know when it does. Treat a followed link from a relevant, trusted site as the stronger signal, and a nofollow link as a bonus rather than a ranking plan.
How many websites use nofollow links?
About one in three websites uses nofollow somewhere. HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac found nofollow on 32.7% of mobile sites, up from 29.5% in 2022 [8]. The newer values barely registered: sponsored appeared on 0.4% of mobile sites and ugc on 0.3% [8].
The same data shows 0.5% of mobile sites using rel="dofollow" [8]. That value does nothing. Neither Google nor Bing lists it as a supported value, so those links behave exactly like links with no rel value at all.
Looking at links rather than sites, Ahrefs found in 2020 that 10.6% of the backlinks pointing at the top 110,000 websites were nofollow, while ugc and sponsored together made up well under 0.1% [9].
Are business directory links nofollow?
Most business directory links are nofollow. Of the 192 sites in Search Insider's Foundation Links list that link to a business's website at all, 113 mark that link nofollow, sponsored or ugc, and 74 leave it followed [7].
Search Insider checked the website link on live business listings across the 300 sites in Foundation Links, its free list of places a new business should be listed [7]. The checks ran in September and October 2026, looking at how each site actually marked the link to the business's own website.
| How the website link was marked | Sites |
|---|---|
| Nofollow, sponsored or ugc | 113 |
| Followed (no nofollow) | 74 |
| Sent through the site's own redirect | 5 |
| No website link at all | 84 |
| Depends on the member's own listing | 24 |
A followed link is the exception on most large directories and review platforms, which is worth knowing before paying for an upgraded listing on the promise of a link.
When should you use nofollow links?
Use nofollow, or the more specific values, on links you don't want to vouch for:
- Paid and affiliate links: use
sponsored(nofollow is also accepted). - Comments and forum posts: use
ugc, which most platforms add automatically. - Links you don't trust but have to include: use
nofollow.
Don't use nofollow on links between your own pages. Since the 2009 change, it wastes ranking value rather than redirecting it [2]. Search Insider does not support or suggest using private blog networks, and nofollow is not a way to make paid link schemes acceptable: paid links should carry sponsored or nofollow [5].