What is a nofollow link, answered in one paragraph

Short answer: a nofollow link is a hyperlink with rel="nofollow" in its HTML, which tells Google the site does not vouch for the page it links to. Google has treated that label as a hint since September 2019, so it may still use the link. For paid links it prefers rel="sponsored", and for links posted by users, rel="ugc".

Everything below answers the questions that usually come next.

What does a nofollow link look like?

It is an ordinary link with one extra attribute:

<a href="https://example.com/" rel="nofollow">example</a>

Readers see nothing different. The attribute is read by search engines, not by people.

What does nofollow tell Google?

According to Google's guide to qualifying outbound links, you use nofollow when you would rather Google not associate your site with the linked page, or not crawl that page from your link, and neither of the other two values applies. A plain link with no rel at all is the normal case: Google fetches and reads it as usual.

Does Google obey it?

Not strictly. When nofollow appeared, around 2005, Google ignored such links as ranking signals. On September 10, 2019, Google announced that nofollow, sponsored and ugc would all be treated as hints, used with other signals. For crawling and indexing, the switch to a hint came on March 1, 2020. Google also notes that a nofollow link generally won't be followed, but the target page can still be found through a sitemap or other sites' links.

Is a nofollow link worth having?

It can be, for reasons other than rankings:

• It sends real visitors when people click it.
• It can help Google discover your page.
• The text around it, such as a sentence naming your company, stays on the page for readers and for any AI tool that reads that page.

Just don't plan as if it passes ranking credit. You cannot see whether Google used it.

When must a link be nofollow or sponsored?

When someone paid for it, in money, goods or services. Google's spam policies call buying or selling links for ranking a form of link spam, and say paid links are acceptable when they carry nofollow or sponsored. That covers sponsored posts, affiliate links and reviews written in exchange for a free product.

What is the difference between nofollow, sponsored and ugc?

• sponsored: ads and paid placements.
• ugc: links in comments, forum posts and other user content.
• nofollow: anything else you don't want to stand behind.

You can combine them, as in rel="ugc nofollow". Getting the choice slightly wrong is cheap; Google said marking a non-ad link as sponsored at most means it may not credit that link. Leaving a paid link unmarked is the real problem.

Is a nofollow link the same as a nofollow page?

No. A robots meta tag such as <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> applies to every link on the page. Google defines it as "Do not follow the links on this page." The link attribute applies to one link only.

Does nofollow keep a page out of Google?

No. To keep a page out of results, let Google crawl it and add noindex. Google said using nofollow for that purpose was never recommended.

How can I check whether links to my site are nofollow?

For one link on a page you can see, view the page source and look at the rel attribute. To see the pattern across a whole domain, the seogeoaeo.ai Backlink Finder lists the 100 strongest sites linking in and, for each one, the share of its linking pages that are followed rather than nofollow. It costs 70 credits per run and works on any public domain, yours or a competitor's. Its figures are the data provider's estimates, so it cannot tell you which links Google actually counts.

Do I need to replace old nofollow links?

No. Google said existing nofollow markup keeps working, including on paid links. Switch new paid links to sponsored when it suits you.