A nofollow link tells search engines not to pass ranking credit. That does not make it worthless, and since 2019 it does not even reliably mean the link is ignored. Here is what the attribute actually does, when it matters, and how to check any link in ten seconds.
Someone offers you a link and the first thing an experienced SEO checks is whether it carries a nofollow attribute. That check takes ten seconds and most people building their first links do not know how to do it, or what the answer means once they have it. This covers the mechanics, the three attributes that now exist, what changed in 2019, and where the received wisdom is wrong.
What a nofollow link actually is
By default, a link on the web passes ranking signals. Site A links to site B, and search engines treat that as a vote for B. A nofollow attribute interrupts that. In the page’s HTML, an ordinary link looks like this:
<a href="https://example.com">anchor text</a>A nofollow link looks like this:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">anchor text</a>The rel="nofollow" value tells search engines the linking site does not want to endorse the destination. Visitors see no difference — the link works identically for humans. The distinction exists purely for crawlers. Google introduced the attribute in 2005 to deal with comment spam. Blog comments were being flooded with links purely to manipulate rankings, and nofollow gave publishers a way to keep the comments open without vouching for whatever people dropped in them.
The three attributes that exist now
In 2019 Google split the single attribute into three, and most guides written before then are out of date.
rel="nofollow" — the general case. The linking site does not endorse the destination. Comment sections, user-generated content, links the publisher has not vetted.
rel="sponsored" — the link was paid for, or resulted from an advertising, sponsorship, or affiliate arrangement. Google’s guidance is that paid links should carry this. Affiliate links belong here.
rel="ugc" — user-generated content specifically. Forum posts, comments, community submissions. They can be combined, and often are: rel="sponsored nofollow" is common on affiliate links where the publisher wants to be unambiguous. For practical purposes all three prevent the link from passing ranking credit the way a plain link does. The distinction matters more for the publisher — using the right one signals to Google that you are labelling honestly rather than hiding something.
The 2019 change that most guides missed
Alongside the new attributes, Google changed how it treats all of them. Before 2019, nofollow was a directive — Google would not follow the link or pass signals, full stop. Since March 2020, Google treats all three attributes as hints rather than directives. Its stated position is that it may use them as a signal while still choosing to consider the link for crawling and indexing purposes. The practical implication is genuinely useful: a nofollow link is no longer guaranteed to be ignored. It might be counted. You cannot rely on that, and you should not build a strategy around it, but the old model where nofollow means zero is no longer accurate. This is why the modern advice on nofollow links is softer than it was. They are not the dead ends they were treated as for fifteen years.
Where nofollow links usually appear
Knowing the common sources saves you checking every time.
- Social media. Almost universally nofollow. Links from Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit
- Blog comments. Nofollow or ugc on any competently configured site. WordPress applies nofollow to comment links by default
- Forums and communities. Signatures and post links, typically ugc
- Wikipedia. All external links, nofollow
- Press release distribution. Should be nofollow or sponsored, and Google’s policies name press release links as a common scheme when they are not
- Paid placements and sponsorships. Should carry sponsored. Many do not, which is the publisher’s risk rather than yours
- Affiliate links. Should be sponsored
- Some directories. Varies enormously. Check before paying for anything — the how to get backlinks guide covers which tactics tend to produce which attribute
How to check a link in ten seconds
Four methods, fastest first.
Right-click and inspect. On any page, right-click the link, choose Inspect, and the highlighted HTML shows the <a> tag with any rel attribute. This works in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari with developer tools enabled.
View source and search. Ctrl+U or Cmd+Option+U to view page source, then Ctrl+F for your domain. You will see the full tag including any rel value. Slower than inspect but works when the page uses JavaScript that makes inspection awkward.
A browser extension. Several SEO extensions highlight nofollow links visually across a whole page, which is far faster when you are auditing many links at once. Useful when checking a prospective partner’s outbound profile.
Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. Backlink reports flag dofollow versus nofollow as a filter. This is how you audit your existing profile in bulk rather than one link at a time — the link building for beginners guide covers the wider set of quality signals worth filtering on.
Do nofollow links have any value?
Yes, and dismissing them is a common beginner mistake in the opposite direction.
Referral traffic is the obvious one. A nofollow link on a page with real readers sends real visitors. Those visitors do not care about the rel attribute, and a link that sends people is doing something a dofollow link on a dead page is not. This is directly measurable in your analytics, unlike ranking effects.
Profile naturalness. A backlink profile consisting entirely of dofollow links is anomalous. Real sites accumulate social shares, comment mentions, forum references — all nofollow. A profile with zero nofollow links suggests every link was acquired deliberately.
Brand mentions and discovery. Recent research on AI search visibility suggests unlinked and nofollow brand mentions correlate with citation in AI-generated answers at a meaningful rate. Places that generate them — Reddit threads, YouTube descriptions, industry forums — show up repeatedly in citation sets. The do backlinks still matter analysis covers what the 2026 data actually shows.
They might count anyway. Per the hint change above.
What this means when someone offers you a link
Practical rules for evaluating an offer.
Ask directly. “Will the link be do-follow and in body content?” is a normal question and anyone offended by it is not worth trading with. Vagueness here is informative.
A nofollow exchange is not an exchange. If you place a dofollow link and receive a nofollow one, you gave value and received a courtesy. That is a bad trade, not a cautious one.
Do not use nofollow as a compliance strategy. Some people add nofollow to their outbound exchange links thinking it reduces risk. It does not address the pattern that creates the risk, and the other party will notice and stop dealing with you.
Verify after placement. Agreement is not implementation. Check the live page once the link goes up, and check again periodically — attributes get added during site-wide SEO cleanups, and a link that was dofollow in March may not be in September.
When you should nofollow your own outbound links
The other half of this, and the half most guides skip entirely. You control the rel attribute on every link leaving your site, and getting this wrong has consequences that are yours rather than someone else’s.
Use sponsored on anything you were paid for, any affiliate link, and any placement that resulted from a commercial arrangement. This is not optional under Google’s guidelines, and the failure mode is real: a site with a hundred unlabelled affiliate links is a site that sells links, whatever its owner believes it is doing.
Use ugc or nofollow on comments, forum posts, user profiles, and anything submitted by someone who is not you. WordPress handles comments by default; check that any plugin adding user content does the same.
Leave editorial links plain. If you referenced a source because it was useful, that is exactly the link the web is built on. Nofollowing your genuine references does not conserve anything meaningful and it makes your outbound profile look evasive. The old practice of nofollowing outbound links to hoard PageRank — link sculpting — stopped working in 2009 when Google changed how nofollow affects the flow. Sculpting is not a strategy; it just removes a signal you would otherwise be sending. Audit your own outbound links occasionally. Most sites have accumulated more than the owner remembers, some of it pointing at places that no longer reflect well on them.
Edge cases worth knowing
Sitewide nofollow via meta tag. A page can carry <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> in its head, which applies to every link on that page regardless of individual rel attributes. Rare, but it means a link can look clean in the tag and still pass nothing. Checking the page source for a robots meta tag takes seconds.
JavaScript-injected links. Some sites render links client-side. Inspecting the DOM shows the final state, which is what matters, but view-source may not show the link at all.
Redirected links. A link pointing at an internal redirect or a click-tracker rather than directly at your URL behaves differently. Check where the href actually points, not just whether it carries nofollow.
Publishers who nofollow everything. Some large sites apply nofollow to all outbound links as blanket policy. Worth knowing before you invest effort pursuing a placement there — the link will be real, visible, and traffic-generating, but it will not move rankings.
The short version
A nofollow link tells search engines not to treat the link as an endorsement. Since 2020 that instruction is a hint rather than a rule, so the link may still be considered. Prefer dofollow for anything you are trading value to obtain. Do not refuse nofollow links that arrive naturally or that sit on pages with real audiences, because referral traffic and profile naturalness are both worth having. And check before you commit, not after. It takes ten seconds and it is the single most common thing beginners forget to verify.
