What Is Follow vs Nofollow?

How Follow vs Nofollow Works

Every hyperlink starts life followable. Write <a href="https://example.com">, add nothing, and search engines are free to follow the link and pass a share of ranking credit — link equity — to the destination along its anchor text. That is the “follow” side, and it is the default state of every link on the web. Importantly, there is no rel="follow" attribute to apply; “follow” is just the word the SEO community uses for a link that has nothing holding it back.

The “nofollow” side is where an actual attribute enters. Adding rel="nofollow" tells search engines you are pointing at a page but not vouching for it, so they should withhold ranking credit. Google’s guidance describes the plain nofollow value as the one to use “when other values don’t apply, and you’d rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site.” The follow/nofollow distinction, then, is really about one question: are you willing to stake a little of your site’s credibility on where this link points?

Two refinements matter. First, since March 1, 2020, Google treats nofollow as a hint for crawling and indexing rather than a hard rule, so the wall between follow and nofollow is now more of a lean than a barrier. Second, nofollow is no longer the only qualifier: as of September 2019, sponsored and ugc sit alongside it, so “nofollow” in practice covers a small family of attributes that all pull a link away from the followed default.

When to Follow and When to Nofollow

• Follow (do nothing) — genuine editorial links: a resource you recommend, a source you cite, a page you are happy to be associated with. This is the vast majority of links and needs no attribute.
• Nofollow / sponsored — any link you were paid to include or that is an advertisement; use the specific sponsored attribute Google now prefers.
• Nofollow / ugc — links inside user-generated areas like comments and forums, better marked with the ugc attribute.
• Plain nofollow — untrusted destinations, or links you simply do not want crawled from your site, where the more specific values don’t apply.

Example of Follow vs Nofollow

The distinction is best understood through the moment Google formalized it. On September 10, 2019, in “Evolving ‘nofollow’ — new ways to identify the nature of links,” Google announced that the single nofollow value was being expanded. It kept rel="nofollow" and added rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc", and it declared that all three would work as hints for ranking purposes immediately, with nofollow also becoming a hint for crawling and indexing as of March 1, 2020.

Read carefully, that announcement redraws the whole follow-versus-nofollow map. Before it, the line was binary: a link was either followed and credit-passing, or nofollowed and dead to rankings. After it, “nofollow” is a spectrum of disclosures — is this paid, is this user-generated, or is it simply untrusted — and every one of those is a hint Google weighs rather than a command it obeys. Google explained the logic plainly: links carry valuable information, and even nofollowed links help it understand unnatural linking patterns, so throwing that information away made the search engine worse.

The practical lesson from Google’s own framing is that follow versus nofollow is a disclosure decision, not a scoring trick. Google’s warning in the same announcement — that anyone relying on nofollow to keep a page out of the index should use robots.txt or a noindex tag instead — makes the boundary explicit. Choosing follow or nofollow tells search engines the nature of a link; it does not control access, and since 2020 it does not even guarantee a link is uncrawled.

Follow vs Nofollow at a Glance

For the two terms this comparison sits between, see nofollow link and dofollow link.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Follow versus nofollow comes down to whether a link passes ranking credit: followed links can, nofollowed links ask search engines not to. Follow is the default behavior of every link, while nofollow is a deliberate attribute — softened to a hint in 2020 — that flags a link you don’t endorse. The distinction is about disclosure and trust, not a ratio to game.