Nofollow

4 minute read · Updated 28 August 2026

Definition

rel="nofollow" is a رابط attribute that tells search engines not to pass ranking value through that link. Introduced in 2005 to fight comment spam, it is appropriate for paid placements and for links a site did not choose.

Since 2019 Google treats it as a hint rather than a directive, and two more specific values exist alongside it: sponsored for paid links and ugc for user-generated content.

The three values, and when to use which

sponsored — the link was paid for, or is part of an affiliate or advertising arrangement. This is the one that keeps you out of trouble.
ugc — the link came from a comment, a forum post, a user profile. Anything a visitor wrote.
nofollow — the catch-all. Still valid, still understood, and still the right choice when you want to reference something without vouching for it.

They can be combined: rel="sponsored nofollow" is legitimate and common on affiliate links. Since 2019 all three are treated as hints, which means a search engine may still follow the link for discovery — it simply will not treat it as an endorsement.

Why it does not work on internal links

This is the single most persistent piece of outdated advice in internal linking, so it is worth being precise about.

The technique was called PageRank sculpting. The theory: a page divides its value among its outgoing links, so if you nofollow the links to unimportant pages — login, cart, terms — the remaining links each carry a larger share. For a few years that was true.

In June 2009 Google changed how it counts. A nofollowed link still consumes its share of the page’s value; that share is then discarded rather than redistributed. Nofollowing five of ten links does not double what the other five carry. It throws half of it away.

The rule that follows is simple: if a page should not receive value, do not link to it. Remove the link, or exclude the page from the linking rules — do not decorate the link with an attribute and expect the flow to redirect itself.

What it does not do

It does not keep a page out of the index. That is what noindex is for, and the two are regularly confused. A nofollowed page can still be found and indexed through any other route — a sitemap, an external link, a redirect.

It also does not block crawling. Only robots.txt does that, and blocking a URL there prevents a crawler from ever seeing the noindex on it — which is why the two instructions should not be combined on the same page.

What to use instead

Every goal people reach for nofollow to achieve has a correct instrument.

Keep a page out of the index → noindex in a robots meta tag on that page.
Stop a URL being fetched at all → robots.txt. Never combine it with noindex: a blocked URL cannot be read, so the noindex is never seen.
Consolidate duplicate addresses → a canonical tag, or a redirect if the old address should stop working.
Stop a page receiving internal value → remove the links to it, or exclude it in whatever tool places them.

Login pages, carts and checkout steps are the usual examples, and none of them need nofollow. Most are already noindexed by the software that generates them.

Where it still earns its place

Three cases, all of them external.

Paid and affiliate links. Not optional — passing ranking value through a paid placement is a link scheme in Google’s terms, and sponsored is the correct marker.

User-generated content. Comments, forum posts, profile fields. ugc exists precisely because you did not write these and cannot vouch for where they point.

Citations you do not endorse. Quoting a source to disagree with it, or linking to something as evidence rather than as a recommendation.

Notice that all three concern vouching. That is the attribute’s actual meaning, and reading it that way makes most decisions obvious.

Checking what your site actually sends

Themes and plugins add these attributes without announcing it. A crawler will list every nofollowed link on the site — in Screaming Frog under Bulk Exports › Links › All Outlinks, filtered on the follow status.

What to look for: internal links carrying nofollow at all. Almost every instance is either a leftover from a sculpting attempt years ago or a plugin default nobody reviewed. Both are worth removing, because each one discards a share of value that would otherwise have gone somewhere useful.

Going deeper: nofollow on internal links is one of the five mistakes that undo internal linking work.

Related terms