What is a Nofollow Attribute?

Google introduced the nofollow attribute on January 18, 2005, with Yahoo and MSN Search backing it, to help website owners (but mostly bloggers) combat comment spam. Spammers were planting links in blog comments to boost their own sites. Nofollow let a blog carry those links without vouching for them, protecting its own authority and rankings.

On September 10, 2019, Google added two more link attributes. The rel="sponsored" value marks links created as part of advertisements, sponsorships, or other compensation agreements, and rel="ugc" marks links inside user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts. Each value qualifies an individual link, not a whole page.

The same announcement changed how nofollow works. Google once ignored nofollowed links entirely; now Google treats all three attributes (nofollow, sponsored, and ugc) as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search. Its stated reason: fully ignoring those links meant losing useful information, like how anchor text describes the page it points to and how unnatural linking patterns show up. The hint model applied to ranking immediately and extended to crawling and indexing on March 1, 2020.

What a nofollow link looks like in HTML

The value goes in the rel attribute of a standard anchor tag: <a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">anchor text</a>. You can combine values by separating them with spaces; rel="ugc nofollow" is valid and marks a link as both user-generated and unendorsed.

WordPress's block editor doesn't include a nofollow toggle by default. You can edit the link's HTML yourself, or use an SEO plugin. Yoast SEO's link settings add nofollow and sponsored options when you edit a link in the block editor, though not in the classic editor (Yoast help center, accessed August 2026). Its sponsored setting adds both values at once, rel="nofollow sponsored", because some search engines don't understand sponsored.

When to use nofollow, sponsored, or ugc

Google's outbound link documentation boils the choice down to 4 cases:

• rel="sponsored": advertisements and paid placements. Sponsored is preferred for these, though nofollow remains acceptable.
• rel="ugc": links inside user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
• rel="nofollow": any link you want to make without implying endorsement or passing ranking credit.
• None of the three: regular links you trust. An ordinary external link to a source you'd recommend doesn't need nofollow, sponsored, or ugc.

Nofollow vs. dofollow links

“Dofollow” isn't an actual HTML value. It's SEO shorthand for a followed link, which is the default state of every link:

• A followed (dofollow) link contains none of nofollow, sponsored, or ugc in its rel attribute and can pass ranking credit. It may still carry unrelated rel values, like noopener or noreferrer; what matters to search engines is whether one of the three qualifiers is present.
• A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow" and asks search engines not to treat it as an endorsement.

What nofollow means for SEO

A nofollowed backlink generally won't pass ranking credit, so it won't move your rankings the way a followed link can. Under the hint model, though, Google may still choose to consider it, and nofollow no longer guarantees that a linked page stays out of the index. Nofollowed links keep their human value: they bring referral traffic, and real link profiles naturally include a mix of followed and nofollowed links.

So if you're doing link building, don't turn down a nofollowed link from a relevant site; readers still click it. Our guide to getting backlinks covers 12 strategies that work. And if your goal is to keep a page out of search results, nofollow is the wrong tool: add a noindex tag to the page itself.