Nofollow

Nofollow is a link attribute, written as rel="nofollow", that tells search engines the linking site does not want to pass ranking credit to the destination. Google introduced it in 2005, primarily to give publishers a way to disclaim responsibility for user-generated content and comment-section links during the height of comment spam.

In 2019 Google expanded the model with rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content. The same year, Google announced that all three attributes — nofollow, sponsored, and ugc — would be treated as hints rather than strict directives. The crawler may still follow the link and the ranking systems may still factor it in, at Google's discretion.

For operators, this changed the audit posture. A nofollow link from a high-authority publication is no longer worthless. It still carries referral traffic, still appears in Backlink crawls, and may still contribute to ranking signals if Google chooses to treat it as a credible mention. Pursuing placements on top-tier sites is worthwhile even if the site's policy is to nofollow all outbound links.

Common places nofollow is applied automatically: Wikipedia citations, Reddit submissions, Medium author links, comment sections, and most social-platform profile links. Most editorial mentions in news articles and industry blogs are dofollow by default unless the publisher has a blanket policy.

When you are building a healthy backlink profile, expect 20–40% of inbound links to be nofollow in normal conditions. Profiles that are 100% Dofollow look manufactured and may attract algorithmic scrutiny. The diversity of attribute types across Referring Domain is itself a quality signal — real link profiles are messy and mixed.

One important distinction: nofollow on an outbound link is different from nofollow in the robots-meta tag, which controls whether a page is included in search results. The two concepts share a keyword but operate at different layers.