nofollow
Also called: no follow, rel nofollow, rel=nofollow
Nofollow is a link attribute (rel="nofollow") that tells Google you would rather not pass ranking credit to, or be associated with, the linked page. Since 2020 Google treats it as a hint rather than a strict rule, so it no longer reliably blocks crawling or indexing.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN introduced nofollow in 2005 to fight blog comment spam. For years it worked as a hard directive: a nofollowed link passed no PageRank and was dropped from Google’s link graph.
From directive to hint
That changed in two steps. On September 10, 2019 Google began treating nofollow as a hint for ranking purposes, and on March 1, 2020 it extended that hint treatment to crawling and indexing. Google now decides case by case whether to honor the attribute, so you can no longer assume a nofollowed link is invisible to it.
The same 2019 update added two more specific values you can use instead of, or alongside, plain nofollow:
rel="sponsored"for paid, advertising, or affiliate links.rel="ugc"for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts.
They can be combined, for example rel="ugc sponsored". Google’s guidance is to reach for the specific value when it fits and keep plain nofollow for everything else.
One common mistake is using nofollow to keep a page out of the index. It was never built for that, and since the hint change it is even less dependable. To block crawling of internal URLs, use a robots.txt disallow rule; to keep a page out of results, use a noindex robots meta tag.
How it affects your traffic
How nofollow is applied across your site is a technical SEO decision with real consequences. Nofollowing your own internal navigation or pagination can quietly starve important pages of the crawl attention and link equity they need to rank, while forgetting sponsored or ugc tags on paid and comment links exposes you to link-scheme risk. A technical SEO audit maps where these attributes are set, catches the ones costing you traffic, and fixes them at the template level.
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