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The complete guide · Links and SEO

Nofollow vs dofollow links: every type of link, explained

A link is a path, a vote and a label at once. Internal links join your own pages, outbound links point to other sites, and backlinks are other sites pointing to yours. The rel attribute qualifies a link: without it, you vouch for the destination; nofollow, sponsored and ugc tell Google you don’t. “Dofollow” is not an attribute: it is just a normal link.

Here is what each kind and each attribute really does in 2026, from Google’s own documents and engineers, from controlled experiments and from a court record, with the penalties, the law on paid links, and how this site makes those choices in its code.

22 min read

A link, taken apart
  1. The destinationThe address Google can crawl. Without a real href, there is no link for it.
  2. The relationWhat you vouch for. Nothing means yes; nofollow, sponsored or ugc mean no.
  3. The new tabA comfort for readers. Browsers now add noopener on their own.
  4. The anchor textThe words Google reads as the destination’s label.

Only the relation changes how Google counts the link. The rest decides whether it can, and what it learns.

Year nofollow was born
2005
Pages with a nofollow link
32.3%
Pages using sponsored or ugc
0.5%
Median internal · external links per page
43 · 6
Links lost since 2013
66.5%

The map

Three directions, four relations.

Every link has a direction, depending on where it starts and where it lands, and a relation, the rel attribute, which says whether its author vouches for it. Most confusion comes from mixing the two: “backlink” is a direction, “nofollow” a relation. A backlink can be nofollow; an internal link should almost never be.

Another siteYour sitePage APage BA source you citeBacklinkInternalOutbound

  • Internal links

    Your page → your page

    They build the paths through your site: menus, breadcrumbs, links in the text. They decide which pages Google finds, how often it comes back, and how importance spreads. You control all of them.

  • Outbound links

    Your page → another site

    Also called external links. They cite, credit or sell. Each one says, through its rel, whether you vouch for the destination. They don’t cost you rankings.

  • Backlinks

    Another site → your page

    Also called inbound links. The ones search engines learned to count first, and the ones people try to buy. You control none of them, which is exactly why they are worth something.

What a link is worth

Less than in 2005, more than Google likes to say.

Google was built on links. The PageRank patent, filed in January 1998, treated each link as a vote, weighted by the importance of the page casting it; the paper that presented Google the same year also credited a link’s anchor text to the page it points to. Twenty-eight years later, both ideas still run.

Google’s engineers have spent years lowering expectations. Gary Illyes said in 2023 that links were no longer a top-three ranking factor, and in 2024 that Google needs “very few links to rank pages”. Its spam policy page once called links “an important factor”, then “a factor”, then dropped the sentence in September 2024.

Then came a court record. In the 2025 remedies phase of the US antitrust case against Google, notes from a call with a Google engineer described anchors (“a source page pointing to a target page”) as one of three core signals of topicality, and PageRank as a signal of distance from known good sources that feeds a quality score. Links still matter; each one simply matters less, and what counts is where it comes from.

Two details from Google’s own podcast undo common beliefs. The PageRank Google computes is not the 0-to-10 score its old toolbar showed: Gary Illyes describes an integer from 0 to “65,000-something”, and says of the toolbar number: “That’s never what we’ve been using.” And Google has no domain score: Domain Rating and Domain Authority are tools’ estimates. “It’s not our domain score. We don’t have that,” Danny Sullivan says.

“We need very few links to rank pages.”

Gary IllyesAnalyst, Google SearchSERP Conf 2024
  • 0.255

    Correlation between the number of referring domains and ranking, the strongest link measure in a study of 1 million keywords. Real, and modest.

    Ahrefs, January 2025
  • 2,997

    Pages, out of about 20 million with no links from other sites, that get more than 1,000 search visits a month. Almost all sit on strong sites, on easy queries.

    Ahrefs, December 2023
  • 94%

    Google AI Overviews that cite at least one page from the top 20 results. Ranking, which links help, still feeds the AI answers.

    seoClarity, October 2025

The rel values

What each rel value really says.

The rel attribute describes your relation to the page you link to. Google reads four answers. You can combine them with spaces (rel="ugc nofollow"), and since September 2019 Google treats all three qualifiers as hints rather than orders: it may still use such a link to discover a page. Its documentation today still says these links “will generally not be followed”: assume they pass nothing.

  1. (none)A normal link
    What it says
    “I vouch for this page.” What people call a “dofollow” link: there is no such attribute.
    What Google does
    Follows it, counts it toward PageRank and reads its anchor text as a label for the destination.
    When to use it
    Your own pages, and every source you cite and stand by.
  2. nofollowNo endorsement
    What it says
    “I don’t vouch for this page.” Born in January 2005, with Yahoo and MSN, against blog comment spam.
    What Google does
    A hint since 2019 for ranking, since March 2020 for crawling. Generally not followed, not credited.
    When to use it
    Links you can’t vouch for and that are neither paid nor user-posted. Never your own pages.
  3. sponsoredPaid or gifted
    What it says
    “This link exists because of money, a gift or a deal.” Added in September 2019; nofollow remains acceptable.
    What Google does
    The same treatment as nofollow. The only case where the wrong attribute is a problem: an unmarked paid link.
    When to use it
    Ads, paid placements, affiliate links, links in exchange for a product or a discount.
  4. ugcPosted by users
    What it says
    “A visitor put this link here, not us.” Added in September 2019.
    What Google does
    The same treatment as nofollow. Google suggests lifting it for members with a record of good contributions.
    When to use it
    Comments, forum posts, reviews, profiles.

noopener and noreferrer are not SEO

noopener stops the page you open from controlling yours through window.opener. Since Safari 12.1 (2019), Firefox 79 (2020) and Chrome 88 (2021), browsers apply it by themselves to every target="_blank" link. noreferrer goes further: it also hides where the visitor came from, so the site you link to sees a “direct” visit.

Neither changes how Google counts a link. When Google made nofollow a hint, Gary Illyes said it was catching up: the other big search engines already treated it that way. Note too that sponsored and ugc aren’t in the HTML standard: they are search-engine conventions, and almost nobody uses them, with each on 0.5% of pages against 32.3% for nofollow (HTTP Archive, 2025).

“I would be very surprised if there was any big social media site out there with dofollow links that we haven’t already marked as nofollow internally for ourselves.”

Gary IllyesGoogle Search, on links from social platformsSearch Off the Record, episode 23

Internal links

Internal links: the paths you control.

Internal links are the one lever you fully control. They tell Google which pages exist (a page no other page links to, an orphan, may never be found), how important each is, and what it is about through the words of the anchor. Google’s own advice is short: every page you care about needs a link from at least one other page of your site, and there is “no magical ideal number of links”.

Two technical rules matter more than any strategy. Google only follows real <a href> elements: a <span> with a click handler, a javascript: address or a router call without href is invisible. And nofollow on your own pages saves nothing: since about 2008, the share of importance given to a nofollowed link simply disappears, which is why Matt Cutts told site owners in 2009 never to use it inside their site. In 2020, 35.3% of the top 110,000 sites still did.

When one page links twice to the same address, Google may keep only the first anchor (tests by Zyppy, 2023): a menu link earlier in the code can win over the descriptive one in your text.

“In general, whenever you’re linking around within your site: don’t use nofollow.”

Matt CuttsThen head of web spam, GooglePageRank sculpting, June 2009
  • +7%

    Organic traffic after adding links to nearby location pages, in a controlled split test on about 8,000 pages.

    SearchPilot
  • +11%

    From showing four related articles instead of two at the end of each page, at 90% confidence.

    SearchPilot
  • ≈ 5×

    Traffic for pages with at least one exact-match internal anchor, over 23 million internal links on 1,800 sites (a correlation).

    Zyppy, 2022

Outbound links

Outbound links: cite, and say what you vouch for.

Linking out doesn’t cost you rankings, and Google’s documentation says citing your sources can help establish trust. John Mueller has also said outbound links are not a ranking factor as such. The only experiment usually quoted for the opposite, Reboot Online’s, used ten new domains and invented keywords: suggestive, too small to settle anything.

The real decision is the rel. Google asks for nofollow only “when you don’t trust the source, and not for every external link”. Blanket nofollow, the policy many publishers adopted (Forbes and Inc. switched every external link in 2017), is what made Google turn nofollow into a hint: it was losing information. Nicholas Carr called Wikipedia’s 2007 switch a black hole that soaks up links and never gives any back.

Leave the link normal

  • A source you read and stand by.
  • A tool, study or person you recommend.
  • Your own other sites, if they are genuinely related.

Qualify the link

  • sponsored: anything paid, gifted, discounted or affiliate.
  • ugc: anything a visitor posted.
  • nofollow: anything you can’t vouch for.
  • noreferrer: only if the destination mustn’t know you sent the visit.

History

From a vote to a hint.

Twenty-eight years of the same idea, and of people gaming it.

  1. 1998

    PageRank

    Larry Page files the patent on January 9. The paper presenting Google, in April, counts each link as a vote and credits its anchor text to the target page.

  2. Jan 18, 2005

    nofollow is born

    Google, with Yahoo and MSN, introduces rel="nofollow" to take the reward out of blog comment spam.

  3. Jan 2007

    Wikipedia closes the tap

    English Wikipedia makes every external link in its articles nofollow.

  4. Jun 2009

    Sculpting ends

    Matt Cutts reveals that, since about a year earlier, nofollowed links no longer pass their share of PageRank to the others: nofollowing internal links no longer “sculpts” anything.

  5. 2011–2013

    Public penalties

    J.C. Penney, Overstock, Interflora and Rap Genius lose their rankings over bought or traded links; Google demotes its own Chrome page in 2012.

  6. 2012

    Penguin and disavow

    Penguin (April 24) targets link spam, affecting about 3.1% of English queries. The disavow tool follows on October 16.

  7. 2016

    Devalue, don’t demote

    The public toolbar PageRank score is retired. Penguin 4.0 (September 23) runs in real time and discounts bad links rather than demoting whole sites.

  8. Sep 10, 2019

    sponsored, ugc, and hints

    Google adds sponsored and ugc and turns all three values into hints for ranking, then for crawling from March 1, 2020.

  9. Dec 2022

    SpamBrain

    The last update dedicated to links uses SpamBrain to spot both sites buying links and sites selling them.

  10. 2023–2024

    Links matter less

    Gary Illyes: links aren’t top three (2023), Google needs very few (2024). The spam policy drops “an important factor”. Leaked documentation shows link fields such as pagerankNs and anchor spam scores, without their weights.

  11. 2025–2026

    Confirmed, and extended to AI

    The US antitrust record confirms PageRank and anchors still feed ranking. In May 2026, spam policies cover generative AI answers; from August 30, site reputation abuse no longer brings manual actions inside the EEA.

Myths

What most articles get wrong.

  • “Add rel="dofollow" to your links.”

    The value doesn’t exist. A link without rel is followed.

  • “Nofollow keeps your PageRank at home.”

    Since about 2008 the nofollowed share simply evaporates.

  • “Nofollow keeps a page out of Google.”

    Only noindex does, on a page Google may crawl.

  • “Nofollow is wrong for paid links.”

    Still acceptable; sponsored is only preferred.

  • “noopener and noreferrer help SEO.”

    Security and privacy only; noreferrer hides you from the destination’s analytics.

  • “sponsored and ugc are HTML standards.”

    They are search-engine conventions, on 0.5% of pages.

  • “Disavow toxic links every quarter.”

    Only for a manual action, or a real risk of one.

  • “rel="sponsored" is my legal disclosure.”

    People need a visible label next to the link.

  • “Domain Authority is Google’s score.”

    It is a tool’s estimate. Google says it has no domain score.

  • “301 redirects lose PageRank.”

    Google says no PageRank is lost, with a 301 or a 302.

  • “A sitemap replaces links.”

    It only says a page exists; a link also says who vouches for it.

  • “Links are dead” or “links are top three”.

    Both wrong: fewer links count, and they still do.

Case study

How this site links.

Contenttosocial publishes three kinds of pages that link a lot: a ranking of SEO agencies, a catalogue of social post templates and these guides. Every link on them carries a decision. Here are ours, straight from the code.

Seven links, seven decisions

  1. Their Google reviews

    nofollow noopener

    A convenience for the reader, not a recommendation.

  2. “Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini” buttons

    nofollow noopener

    Each opens an agent with a prompt in its address: endless one-off URLs nobody should crawl or credit.

  3. The sources of these guides

    (none)

    Editorial citations we read and stand by: Google’s documentation, papers, talks. Exactly what a normal link is for.

  4. Menus, footer, breadcrumbs

    (none)

    The footer lists every templates page, the header leads to every guide, and every page carries a breadcrumb with its structured data. Nothing that matters sits more than three clicks from home.

  5. Pages waiting for launch

    noindex, follow

    Kept out of Google’s index with a robots tag, not with nofollow, while their links are still followed so no page becomes an orphan.

  6. The badge agencies may add to their site

    one visible link

    Optional and never a condition of being listed; one visible link back to the page the award refers to, nothing hidden.

  7. Every navigation link

    <a href>

    Next.js <Link> renders a real anchor with its address, so crawlers follow the same paths as people.

What it taught us

  1. 01

    Decide per destination, not per site

    The same site can deserve a normal link on one page and a nofollow on another: the relation is about the link and its context, not the domain.

  2. 02

    Hide pages with robots, not with links

    noindex, follow keeps a page out of results without cutting the paths through it.

  3. 03

    Leave referrers alone

    Dropping noreferrer costs nothing and lets the sites you send visits to see them. They may link back.

  4. 04

    A link in an iframe isn’t a link on the host page

    Google credits it to the iframe’s own page. Anything you embed elsewhere needs its link in the host’s HTML.

What we don’t know yet

How many backlinks the ranking will earn, and which ones Google will count. We will watch Search Console knowing its links report is a sample: tables stop at 1,000 rows, and it doesn’t say which links are nofollow.

See the choices live

The rules

Twelve rules that hold up.

From Google’s documentation, the experiments and our own code.

  1. No orphans

    Link every page you care about from at least one other page of your site.

  2. Real links only

    <a href> with an address. No click handlers, javascript: or router calls without href.

  3. Say where it goes

    Descriptive, concise anchors. No “click here”, no stuffing, no chains of adjacent links.

  4. Never nofollow yourself

    To keep a page out of Google, use noindex; to keep crawlers away, robots.txt.

  5. Cite with normal links

    Nofollow only what you can’t vouch for, not every external link.

  6. Label every paid link twice

    sponsored (or nofollow) for Google, and a visible “paid link” or « Publicité » for people.

  7. Qualify user links

    ugc on comments and forums; consider lifting it for trusted contributors.

  8. Never buy, swap or require

    No paid followed links, no link exchanges at scale, no links demanded by terms or badges.

  9. Keep widget links honest

    One visible link, named after a brand or a page, never keyword-stuffed, never mandatory.

  10. Don’t hide your referrals

    target="_blank" already implies noopener; skip noreferrer unless you need it.

  11. Fix what rots

    Two links in three published since 2013 are gone. Check yours.

  12. Leave disavow alone

    Unless you have a manual action, or real reason to expect one.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What does a nofollow link mean?

A link with rel="nofollow": its author tells search engines they don’t vouch for the page it points to. Google treats it as a hint and generally doesn’t follow it or credit it toward ranking.

What is a dofollow link?

A normal link, with no rel qualifier. “Dofollow” isn’t an attribute; rel="dofollow" does nothing. Search engines follow and credit links by default.

Do nofollow links help SEO?

Not directly, by default: they generally pass no ranking credit. They can still bring visitors, get a page discovered, build a brand, and lead to followed links when others pick up the story.

How can I tell if a link is follow or nofollow?

Look at the link’s HTML (right-click, Inspect): if its rel contains nofollow, sponsored or ugc, it is qualified; otherwise it is a normal, followed link. Search Console’s links report doesn’t tell you.

What is the difference between nofollow, sponsored and ugc?

The reason. sponsored marks paid or gifted links, ugc links posted by users, nofollow anything else you don’t vouch for. Google treats the three the same way; only an unmarked paid link is a problem.

Should internal links be nofollow?

No. It saves nothing, since the nofollowed share of importance just disappears, and it can hide pages from Google. Use noindex or robots.txt for pages you want out.

Are backlinks good or bad?

Earned ones help, especially from relevant, trusted sites. Bought or manufactured ones are mostly ignored since 2016, and can bring a manual action. You don’t need many: Google says it needs very few links to rank a page.

Is rel="sponsored" enough to disclose a paid link?

For Google, yes (or nofollow). For the law, no: the FTC in the US and French law require a visible mention for readers, such as “paid link” or « Publicité », next to the link.

Do noopener and noreferrer affect SEO?

No. noopener is security, which browsers now apply to every target="_blank" link by themselves; noreferrer hides the origin of the visit from the destination’s analytics.

Sources

Where this comes from

Quotes are verbatim from the documents and recordings below, trimmed for length; quotes from conference talks come from automatic captions. Figures name who measured them, and correlations are labelled as such.

  1. Qualify your outbound links to GoogleGoogle Search Central · Dec 10, 2025
  2. Link best practices for GoogleGoogle Search Central · Dec 10, 2025
  3. Spam policies: link spamGoogle Search Central · Aug 28, 2026
  4. Evolving nofollow: new ways to identify the nature of linksGoogle Search Central blog · Sep 10, 2019
  5. Preventing comment spam (the birth of nofollow)Google blog · Jan 18, 2005
  6. Penguin is now part of our core algorithmGoogle Search Central blog · Sep 23, 2016
  7. Disavow links to your siteGoogle Search Console Help · 2026
  8. Updating the site reputation policy in the EEAGoogle Search Central blog · Aug 2026
  9. Link typesWHATWG HTML Standard · 2026
  10. rel=noopenerMDN Web Docs · 2026
  11. Web Almanac 2025: SEOHTTP Archive · 2025
  12. US v. Google: remedies opinionUS District Court for D.C. · 2025
  13. PageRank sculptingMatt Cutts · Jun 15, 2009
  14. The decay and fall of guest bloggingMatt Cutts · Jan 20, 2014
  15. Nofollow as a hint, sponsored and ugcGoogle Search News, John Mueller · Sep 2019
  16. Search Off the Record, episode 1: nofollowGoogle, with Gary Illyes, John Mueller, Martin Splitt · 2020
  17. Search Off the Record, episode 8: rendering, signals and PageRankGoogle, with Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt · Oct 22, 2020
  18. Search Off the Record, episode 20: tackling web spamGoogle, with Duy Nguyen · Jul 6, 2021
  19. Search Off the Record, episode 23: the SEO Starter GuideGoogle, with Gary Illyes and John Mueller · Sep 9, 2021
  20. Search Off the Record, episode 51: redirectsGoogle, with Martin Splitt and John Mueller · Nov 17, 2022
  21. Search Off the Record, episode 102: SEO, AIO and GEOGoogle, with John Mueller and Danny Sullivan · Jan 8, 2026
  22. Gary Illyes Q&ASERP Conf 2024 · 2024
  23. SEO office hours (disavow)Google Search Central · Nov 2022
  24. PageRank sculpting at SMX AdvancedMatt Cutts with Danny Sullivan · Jun 2009
  25. Penguin 4.0 keynoteGary Illyes, PubCon Las Vegas · Oct 2016
  26. Nofollow, ugc and sponsored: the dataAhrefs · 2020
  27. Search traffic study: pages without backlinksAhrefs · Dec 2023
  28. Link rot studyAhrefs · Feb 2024
  29. AI Overview brand visibility correlationsAhrefs · May 2025
  30. AI Overviews and rankings overlapseoClarity · Oct 2025
  31. When online content disappearsPew Research Center · May 17, 2024
  32. Internal links: a study of 23 million linksZyppy · 2022
  33. Selective link priorityZyppy · 2023
  34. Disavowing every link, againZyppy · 2024
  35. Split test: nearby location linksSearchPilot · 2021
  36. Long-term outgoing link experimentReboot Online · 2016
  37. Google penalises its own Chrome pageTechCrunch · Jan 4, 2012
  38. Content, shares and links: 1 million articlesMoz and BuzzSumo · 2015
  39. FTC’s Endorsement GuidesUS Federal Trade Commission · 2023
  40. Loi n° 2023-451 (influence commerciale), article 5-2Légifrance · Nov 2024

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SEO agency rankings

Where does your agency rank?

Google positions, citations in Google’s AI answers, the website’s technical setup: every criterion is public and verifiable.

See the ranking
SEO agencies listed
139
published rankings
4
criteria measured for each
19

Finish your content. Schedule the rest.