What Is a Nofollow Link? How It Works and When to Use rel="nofollow" on Your Blog

Most bloggers first meet rel="nofollow" in a comment plugin or an affiliate link, added automatically by a theme or a WordPress default, and never think about it again. That's mostly fine — but a wrong assumption about what nofollow actually does can lead to two very different mistakes: treating it like a ranking penalty, or believing it fully controls how your own link equity moves. It does neither, exactly.

What Nofollow Actually Tells Google

rel="nofollow" is an HTML attribute, not a penalty and not a block. Added to an <a> tag, it tells search engines "don't treat this link as an editorial endorsement I'm vouching for." Google introduced it in 2005 specifically to fight comment spam — site owners could mark auto-generated links (blog comments, forum signatures) so spammers had less incentive to flood them.

For years, Google's stated position was that nofollow links pass essentially no PageRank and don't influence the target page's ranking. Since a 2019 update, Google treats nofollow — along with two newer, more specific tags — as a hint rather than a strict directive, meaning it may still use the link as one signal for crawling and discovery even though it still won't pass ranking value the way a normal link does. Practically, for most blogs the takeaway hasn't changed much: don't rely on a nofollow link to move rankings, and don't add one expecting to hide it from Google's crawler entirely.

This matters more than it sounds like it should, because a lot of blog owners still operate on the older, stricter mental model. They'll nofollow an outbound citation assuming it fully disappears from Google's view, or worse, they'll assume a nofollowed internal link is a safe way to hide a thin page from search without actually blocking it via robots.txt or a noindex tag. Neither assumption holds up under the hint model — a determined crawler can still reach and index a nofollowed page through another path, so nofollow was never a substitute for proper access control in the first place.

The Three Rel Attributes (Not Just One)

Since 2019, "nofollow" isn't the only tag in this family. Google introduced two more specific ones for common cases, and recommends using whichever is most accurate rather than defaulting to plain nofollow for everything:

| Attribute | Meant for | Example | |---|---|---| | rel="nofollow" | General case, or when you're unsure which applies | Untrusted or unverified outbound links | | rel="sponsored" | Paid links, affiliate links, sponsored content | Affiliate product links, paid placements | | rel="ugc" | User-generated content | Blog comments, forum posts | | (no rel attribute) | Default | A normal editorial link you're vouching for |

You can combine them (rel="nofollow sponsored"), and most comment plugins and forum software already apply ugc automatically. If you run affiliate links, sponsored is the one that specifically matters — skipping it on an older post is both a disclosure gap and an SEO one, and it's easy to miss on content written before 2019.

Does Nofollow Block Link Equity From Flowing?

This is where the guidance genuinely changed. Before 2019, a nofollow link was excluded from the link equity calculation entirely, as if the link didn't exist for PageRank purposes. Under the current "hint" model, a nofollow link can still be crawled and can still factor into some ranking systems in a limited capacity — but the safe operating assumption for site owners hasn't really moved: treat nofollow links as passing little to no equity, and don't restructure your linking strategy around the hope that they secretly do.

Where this actually matters day to day is internal links — links between your own pages. There's rarely a good reason to nofollow one. Doing so just blocks your own equity from reaching your own content, which works directly against the goal of a good internal linking audit. Nofollow is a tool for external, untrusted, or paid links, not for organizing your own site.

When Adding Nofollow Actually Helps Your Blog

A few situations where adding the attribute — plain nofollow or the more specific sponsored/ugc variant — is worth doing deliberately:

1. Affiliate and paid links. Any link where money changed hands for placement should carry sponsored. This is as much a disclosure and policy-compliance matter as an SEO one.
2. Untrusted, user-submitted links. Comments, guest books, forum posts — anything a reader can submit without review should default to ugc or nofollow so your blog doesn't become an unintentional link farm for spam.
3. Links to pages you're not vouching for. Citing a source you're critiquing, or linking somewhere for context without endorsing it, is a reasonable manual case for nofollow.
4. Utility pages a reader shouldn't treat as editorial content. Less common, but relevant if something like a /login page ever gets linked from public content and you don't want it read as a recommendation.

What generally doesn't help: nofollowing your own internal links, or blanket-nofollowing every outbound link on the theory that it "saves" equity for your own pages. That's a holdover from the pre-2019 model, and mostly it just makes your content less useful to readers who'd benefit from a normal, followed citation.

Checking Your Blog's Nofollow Usage Without Guessing

Auditing this by hand means opening the page source on every post and searching for rel=, which stops scaling past a handful of articles. Traffic Monitor's Post SEO Audit flags a page's outbound link attributes as part of its broader on-page review, so you can see at a glance which links are followed, which are nofollow, and whether any internal links got nofollowed by accident — the specific mistake worth catching, since it actively works against efforts like a redirect chain checker pass or an internal-linking cleanup instead of protecting anything.

If you've never checked, the two most common findings are affiliate links missing sponsored — a compliance gap as much as an SEO one — and internal links accidentally nofollowed by a theme's global setting. Both are fixable in minutes once you know they're there, and neither is the kind of thing you're likely to notice just by browsing your own site as a reader would.

The broader point carries past nofollow specifically: link attributes are metadata readers never see and rarely think about, which is exactly why they tend to drift out of sync with what a site owner actually intends over a few years of plugin updates, theme changes, and new affiliate partnerships. It's the same category of quiet, structural problem as orphan pages — nothing breaks visibly, so nothing prompts you to look until traffic or an audit tool points at it directly. A periodic check costs a few minutes; catching a global misconfiguration a year late doesn't.