A nofollow link carries a rel="nofollow" attribute telling Google not to pass ranking credit through it. Since 2019 it’s a hint Google may ignore rather than a rule it must obey, and most people are still working from the old model.
Why it exists
Nofollow arrived in 2005 as a response to comment spam. Blogs were being buried under automated comments planted purely to collect links, and nofollow gave publishers a way to say: this link exists, but I’m not vouching for it.
For 14 years it worked as a directive. No credit passed, no argument. Then in 2019 Google reclassified it as a hint it may choose to ignore for crawling and ranking, and split it into 3 more specific values.
The 3 values and when to use each
| Attribute | Use for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
rel="sponsored" | Paid links, affiliate links, advertising | The honest label for anything commercial |
rel="ugc" | Comments, forum posts, user submissions | Usually applied automatically by the CMS |
rel="nofollow" | Anything else you don’t want to endorse | The catch-all |
You can combine them, and Google has said it doesn’t mind if you keep using plain nofollow for paid links. Using sponsored is cleaner because it describes what the link actually is rather than only what you want Google to do about it.
<a href="https://example.com" rel="sponsored">affiliate link</a>
<a href="https://example.com" rel="ugc nofollow">link in a comment</a>What the 2019 change actually means
Treating nofollow as a hint lets Google use these links for discovery and, where it judges the link genuine, potentially for ranking. The practical consequences are worth stating plainly:
- A nofollowed link is not worthless. It can still be crawled, it can still send traffic, and Google may still count it.
- Marking a link sponsored does not neutralise a link scheme. If you’re buying links at scale, labelling them is honest but the pattern is still detectable.
- You can no longer be certain what passes. The old mental model of controlling equity flow with attributes died in 2019.
PageRank sculpting is dead, and has been since 2009
The tactic was: nofollow your less important internal links so more equity flows to the important ones. Google closed it in 2009 by changing how the division works.
Now the equity a page can pass is divided across all its outbound links first, and only then is nofollow applied. The share allocated to a nofollowed link evaporates rather than redistributing. So sculpting doesn’t concentrate authority, it destroys some of it. If you find nofollow on internal links in an audit, it is almost always a mistake nobody has revisited since 2009.
Common mistakes
- Nofollowing internal links. Sculpting stopped working in 2009: the divided equity evaporates rather than redistributing, so it leaks authority instead of concentrating it.
- Leaving affiliate links unmarked. A link scheme problem for Google and a disclosure problem for the ASA and FTC.
- Nofollowing every outbound link. A 2010 instinct. Linking to your sources is a trust signal, and hoarding authority you cannot measure costs you credibility you can.
- Assuming nofollow protects you from bad links. It’s about what you give, not what you receive. Inbound spam is a separate question, and Google says it ignores most of it automatically.
Related
PageRank explains what a link passes and why. Off-page SEO covers link building that works. Anchor text covers what a link communicates.