Every link on a webpage does more than let someone click through to another page. It also sends a signal, and a single line of code attached to that link can completely change what that signal means to a search engine. If you’ve ever come across the term “nofollow link” and wondered what it actually does, this post walks through how it works, why it exists, and a few myths that refuse to die.
How Links Work, Conceptually
A link is just clickable text or an image that points to another page. Click it, and your browser takes you there. That part everyone already understands.
What’s less obvious is that search engines treat links as more than navigation. Google’s original ranking model treated links almost like votes of confidence: a page linked to by many other pages, especially trusted ones, tended to rank higher. People often call this “link equity,” the idea that a link passes along a small amount of trust from one page to another, a bit like a recommendation.
This is why internal links (pointing to other pages on your own site) and external links (pointing to other sites) are treated differently in SEO strategy. Internal links help search engines understand how your site is organised, which is also why a clean internal linking structure is one of the first things worth getting right as part of broader on-page SEO. External links signal trust and context, since they show the company you keep online.
Where These Signals Live
Behind the scenes, links carry a small attribute that describes the relationship between the page you’re on and the page you’re linking to. SEO directives like nofollow are just specific values placed into that attribute. You can even combine more than one on the same link, such as marking something both “nofollow” and “sponsored” at once.
The Different Settings You’ll Encounter
Follow (the default) There’s no actual “follow” tag you’ll find anywhere. It doesn’t exist. A link counts as followed simply because nothing has told it not to be. People often go looking for a “follow” setting and are surprised to learn it was never a real thing to begin with.
Nofollow Introduced in 2005, originally to fight blog and forum comment spam. Marking a link as nofollow tells search engines not to pass ranking credit through it. It doesn’t stop the page from being found or visited; it’s purely a signal about trust and credit.
Sponsored For paid placements, affiliate links, and any link that exists because of a commercial arrangement. Google introduced this option in 2019 so that SEO treatment lines up with how paid content is expected to be disclosed.
UGC Short for user-generated content. This applies to links inside comments, forum posts, or anything a visitor, rather than the site owner, has added.
Two related but unrelated settings You may also come across “noopener” and “noreferrer.” These sit in the same general spot as nofollow, which is why people often lump them in with SEO, but they’re actually security and privacy settings with nothing to do with search rankings. In short, they stop a newly opened tab from being able to interact with the original page and limit what information gets shared with the site you’re linking to. Worth knowing about, but a separate topic from everything else here.
| Setting | What it does | When it’s used |
|---|---|---|
| (none) | Default; passes link trust | Normal links you stand behind |
| Nofollow | Signals “don’t pass ranking credit” | Untrusted or low-value links |
| Sponsored | Flags paid or affiliate links | Paid placements, affiliate content |
| UGC | Flags user-submitted links | Comments, forum posts |
| Noopener / noreferrer | Security and privacy, not SEO | Links that open in a new tab |
How Search Engines Actually Treat These Today
For years, nofollow was treated as a hard rule. If you nofollow a link, Google simply wouldn’t pass any trust through it, full stop.
In 2019, that changed. Nofollow, along with sponsored and UGC, became more of a “hint” than a strict rule. Google now reserves the right to still use a nofollow link as a signal if its systems decide that’s the right call.
This is also where an older trick called PageRank sculpting comes in. The idea worked like this: site owners would nofollow their own outbound links, on the theory that the trust “saved” by not sending it elsewhere would instead pile up on their own pages. It was essentially a way of hoarding authority.
That loophole was actually closed earlier, around 2008 and 2009, when Google changed how nofollow trust behaves. Trust that would have flowed through a nofollow link doesn’t get redirected elsewhere on the page; it just disappears. So there was never any benefit to nofollow your own outbound links in the hope of keeping more authority for yourself.
The 2019 change was a separate, later step. That’s when nofollow itself, along with the newer sponsored and UGC settings, shifted from being a hard rule into more of a hint that search engines can choose to factor in or not.
Why Site Owners Use These Settings
Spam and manipulation control. Nofollow is a useful way to avoid implicitly vouching for content you don’t control, like comments and forum posts.
Outbound trust signals. Nofollow a link can communicate “I’m mentioning this, but not endorsing it,” useful when citing a source you don’t fully agree with.
Disclosure. Marking links as sponsored helps keep your site’s SEO setup in line with disclosure expectations for paid or affiliate content.
A note on “crawl budget.” You’ll sometimes see advice claiming that nofollow saves crawl budget by discouraging search engines from visiting low-value pages. This is outdated. Google has said clearly that nofollow on an internal link doesn’t reliably stop it from being found, since the same page is often discoverable through other links or your sitemap anyway. If your real goal is to keep a page out of search results entirely, the right tool is something called noindex, not nofollow.
Common Mistakes
- Nofollowing internal navigation by accident. This can quietly cut off trust flow through your own site for no good reason.
- Overusing nofollow out of fear. Not every external link needs it. Linking out to genuinely good sources is normal and fine.
- Not marking paid links at all. Skipping the sponsored setting on affiliate or paid content can cause both SEO and disclosure problems.
- Confusing nofollow with noindex. These solve different problems. Nofollow is about whether trust passes through a specific link. Noindex is about whether a page shows up in search results at all. Mixing these up is one of the most common mistakes in this area.
How to Apply These in Practice
In raw HTML, it looks like this:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example link</a>The same idea applies to “sponsored” and “ugc”, just swapping the word inside the quotes.
You’ll rarely need to write this by hand, though. Most website platforms make this easier than editing code directly. WordPress’s editor, for example, has a link settings panel with simple checkboxes for “sponsored,” “nofollow,” and “UGC.” Other platforms vary, but most modern site builders expose these as toggles rather than requiring you to touch any code.
If you want to check how your own site’s links are currently set up, most SEO auditing tools can scan your whole site and report this back to you, so you don’t need to go digging through code page by page. It’s the same kind of housekeeping that pays off alongside getting your keywords and on-page basics right.
Conclusion
Nofollow, sponsored, and UGC aren’t magic switches that hide or boost pages. They’re trust signals that help search engines understand how to weigh a link, and since 2019, they’ve worked more like hints than absolute rules. Used well, they keep your link profile honest. Used carelessly, especially when confused with tools like noindex, they can quietly work against your own site’s structure.
Not sure whether your own site’s links are set up the way you think they are? We’re happy to take a look, no obligation, no pitch.
