What Is Nofollow Link?

How a Nofollow Link Works

A nofollow link is an ordinary HTML anchor with one extra attribute. Where a normal link reads <a href="https://example.com">, a nofollow link reads <a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">. The rel attribute describes the relationship between your page and the destination, and the value nofollow tells search engines a plain thing: I am pointing at this page, but I am not vouching for it.

The reason that matters comes down to how ranking works. When one page links to another, search engines historically treated it as a small vote of confidence, passing a portion of ranking credit — often called link equity — along the anchor text to the target. A nofollow link withholds that vote. Google’s own guidance frames the 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.” It is an editorial disclaimer expressed in markup.

One critical nuance changed the mechanic in 2020. For most of its life, nofollow was a strict directive — Google would not crawl through it, full stop. As of March 1, 2020, Google shifted to treating nofollow as a hint for crawling and indexing purposes. The engine now decides for itself whether to follow and index a nofollowed link, using the attribute as one signal among many rather than an absolute command. That single change is why nofollow can no longer be trusted as an access control.

Why Nofollow Exists

Google introduced rel=“nofollow” in 2005, and the origin story explains its shape. Blog comments, forums, and guestbooks let anyone drop a link on someone else’s site, and spammers were exploiting those open fields to farm ranking credit at scale. Sites had no way to host user links without appearing to endorse every one of them. Nofollow gave webmasters a switch: publish the link, but tell search engines you don’t stand behind it. Overnight, a comment link stopped being a ranking prize.

That heritage is why nofollow shows up automatically in so many places. Most content management systems and forum platforms add rel=“nofollow” to user-submitted links by default. Social platforms, Wikipedia, and large publishers frequently nofollow outbound links they cannot manually vet. Understanding this tells you what a nofollow link is really saying: not “this link is bad,” but “no human editor here personally vouched for it.”

Common Uses of Nofollow Links

• Paid and sponsored placements — any link you were compensated to publish should be qualified so it does not pass ranking credit; Google now prefers the more specific sponsored attribute for this.
• User-generated content — comments, forum posts, and profile links, better marked with the ugc attribute added in 2019.
• Untrusted or unvetted destinations — links you include for reference but cannot personally endorse.
• Links you simply don’t want crawled from your site — the catch-all case Google’s documentation describes for plain nofollow.

Example of a Nofollow Link

The clearest real-world illustration is the way Google itself documented and then evolved the attribute. On September 10, 2019, Google published “Evolving ‘nofollow’ — new ways to identify the nature of links,” announcing that the single nofollow value was being joined by two more specific ones: rel="sponsored" for advertisements and paid placements, and rel="ugc" for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. In the same announcement, Google stated that all three attributes — sponsored, ugc, and nofollow — would work as hints for ranking purposes effective immediately.

The announcement set one date apart. For crawling and indexing purposes, nofollow would become a hint as of March 1, 2020. Google’s stated reason was that links carry valuable information — the words in a link describe the page it points to, and studying all links, including nofollowed ones, helps the engine understand unnatural linking patterns. By moving to a hint model, Google stopped throwing that information away.

Google paired the change with a blunt warning that doubles as the practical lesson: anyone “depending on nofollow solely to block a page from being indexed should use more robust mechanisms” like robots.txt or a noindex tag. It also reassured publishers that there was no need to change existing nofollow links, though switching sponsored content to rel=“sponsored” when convenient was recommended. The event is a documented, dated demonstration of exactly what a nofollow link now is: a strong hint, not a hard rule.

Nofollow Link vs Dofollow Link

A dofollow link is simply the absence of a suppressing attribute — there is no rel="dofollow" value in HTML. For a fuller breakdown of when each is appropriate, see follow vs nofollow.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

A nofollow link is a hyperlink whose rel=“nofollow” attribute tells search engines you are not endorsing where it points, so they should withhold ranking credit. It started in 2005 as a spam-fighting directive and softened into a hint in 2020, meaning Google may still crawl and index the target. It manages endorsement, not access — use noindex or robots.txt to control that.