What Is a Nofollow Link? HTML Example and When to Use It

What is a nofollow link?

A nofollow link is a hyperlink with rel="nofollow" in its HTML, telling search engines you don’t vouch for the destination and would rather they not crawl it from your site.

Visitors see no difference. The link looks and clicks like any other. The only change is one attribute in the code:

<a href="https://example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example Website</a>

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How Google treats nofollow: a hint, not a rule

Nofollow used to be a strict instruction. On September 10, 2019, Google announced it would treat nofollow as a hint, along with two new values, sponsored and ugc. Since March 1, 2020, that hint model has applied to crawling and indexing too.

In practice, Google says links with these values will generally not be followed, but the linked page can still be found and crawled through other routes, such as a sitemap or someone else’s link. So nofollow is not a way to keep a page out of search results. For that, Google’s outbound link guide points you to the noindex rule instead.

Google also said there’s no need to change nofollow links you already have.

Nofollow vs. sponsored vs. ugc

Nofollow is the fallback. Google asks you to use the more specific value when one fits:

Value	Use it for	HTML
sponsored	Ads, sponsorships, affiliate links, other paid placements	rel="sponsored"
ugc	Links visitors add, such as comments and forum posts	rel="ugc"
nofollow	Anything else you don’t want to vouch for	rel="nofollow"

Values can be combined in one attribute, for example rel="ugc nofollow". Google still accepts plain nofollow on paid links, though it prefers sponsored.

Ordinary editorial links don’t need any of these. Google’s link guidance says to use nofollow when you don’t trust the source, not on every link that leaves your site. Our external link entry covers when an outbound link should stay a plain link.

How to add nofollow in WordPress

In the block editor, click the link, open its Advanced settings, and check the “mark as nofollow” option. No HTML editing needed.

If you need sponsored or ugc and neither the editor nor your SEO plugin offers a toggle for it, choose Edit as HTML on the block and add the value to the link’s rel attribute. If a plugin adds nofollow to every external link automatically, check its settings so normal citations stay plain links.

How to check if a link is nofollow

1. Right-click the link.
2. Choose Inspect.
3. Look for nofollow, sponsored, or ugc inside the link’s rel attribute.

To see every qualified link on a page at once, a browser extension that highlights them is faster. A few are in our roundup of SEO Chrome extensions.

A link without any of these values is just a regular link. “Dofollow” is a common nickname for that, not a real HTML attribute.