A nofollow link is an ordinary clickable link with a small label that tells search engines not to pass ranking credit to the page it points at. Semrush's nofollow guide shows where the label lives, inside the link's HTML, the <a> element that makes text clickable: <a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor</a>. The credit being withheld is PageRank, also called link equity, the ranking strength one page passes to another through a link.
That label is one of a family of three. Google's Search Central page on qualifying outbound links defines three rel values that state the relationship between your page and the page you link to. Once you can tell them apart, a backlink list stops reading as good links and bad links, and starts reading as links labeled correctly and links worth a second look.
What Is a Nofollow Link
A rel attribute is a short value inside the link tag that declares why the link exists. With rel="nofollow", the link asks search engines not to pass credit through it.
A link with no rel label at all is the default. Semrush's guide calls it a dofollow, or follow, link, written as <a href="https://example.com/">Click here</a>: no label means the link can pass credit, and a nofollow label marks it to withhold credit.
Nofollow vs Dofollow Links: What's the Difference
For people, there is none. Backlinko's guide stresses that a visitor can't tell by looking, clicking or copying: a nofollow link opens the target like any other link. The restriction applies only to search-engine crawlers, the automated readers that map pages for ranking.
For crawlers, the label decides whether credit moves. Follow links can help the target's rankings. Nofollow links carry little direct ranking power, with one qualifier covered below: the target can still be found and crawled another way.
Sponsored, UGC, and Nofollow: Which Rel Value When
Google's page splits links into paid, user-created and everything else.
sponsored for paid placement. Advertisements and paid placements, commonly called paid links, take sponsored, and affiliate links, which earn a commission when someone buys through them, go in the same bucket. Google's example is <a rel="sponsored" href="https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese">Appenzeller</a>. Backlinko's guide records the history: paid links were once marked nofollow under older guidance and now take the newer sponsored value, because Google wants paid placement disclosed.
ugc for user-generated content. Links that visitors create themselves, in comments, forum posts and user profiles, take ugc. Google's page keeps one exception: when members have consistently made high-quality contributions over time, a site may remove the label from their links as recognition.
nofollow for the rest. Use it when the other two don't fit and you'd rather Google not associate your site with the target, or not crawl the target from your page. For links inside your own site that you don't want fetched, Google's page points to a robots.txt disallow rule instead, the file that tells crawlers which parts of a site to skip.
Labels can also combine. Google's page allows several rel values on one link as a space- or comma-separated list, with ugc nofollow and ugc,nofollow as its examples. When a row in a backlink list carries both, read it as two true statements at once: created by a user, and marked to withhold credit.
Why a Hint, Not a Command, Changes the Read
Google treats these labels as a hint rather than a strict order about crawling and indexing. Its page says links marked this way will generally not be followed, then adds the qualifier that matters: the linked pages may be found through other means, such as sitemaps (files that list a site's pages) or links from other sites, and so may still be crawled.
That corrects a common misread, that nofollow hides a page. A nofollowed link withholds credit through that one link. It doesn't stop discovery: if the target is in a sitemap or linked from elsewhere, it can still turn up in a crawl. Read the label as a statement about one link's credit, and nothing more.
How to Check If a Link Is Nofollow
Any method that shows the rel value on a live link works as a checker.
By hand. Semrush's guide describes the browser path: hover the link, right-click, choose Inspect, and look inside the anchor for a rel attribute; the word nofollow in its value confirms the state. Viewing the page source works the same way: find the link in the HTML, where rel="nofollow" means nofollowed and no rel value means follow.
On a whole page. Highlighter browser extensions strike through the nofollowed links on the rendered page, so you can scan dozens of links without opening the source.
Across a domain. Backlink tools break down the follow versus nofollow split per domain, and Semrush's guide describes filters that isolate a single attribute, such as sponsored, across a domain's active links.
On your own links. To label a placement, pick the value that matches the relationship: sponsored for paid, ugc for user-created, nofollow for the rest you don't want to endorse or have crawled from your page, and both values joined by a space or comma when both apply.
Do Nofollow Links Help SEO?
A nofollow label withholds direct credit, but Semrush's guide lists three reasons the links still get pursued. Referral visits come from popular pages, because people click nofollow links normally. Exposure raises brand awareness, which can bring follow links from other sites whose authors discover you through the nofollowed mention. And a mixed profile looks naturally earned: the same guide flags a follow-only footprint as looking unnatural or manipulative to search engines.
Semrush makes the visit path concrete with a publisher that nofollows all its external links, using Forbes as the example, which still sends its large audience through an author's byline link to the author's site.
Backlinko's guide lists where nofollow links usually come from: blog comments, social posts such as Facebook posts and YouTube descriptions, forum posts and other user-created content, widgets, press releases, and publishers that nofollow all outbound links. Its named examples are Quora, YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitch and Medium.
Follow vs Nofollow Inside a Pull: How to Read the Mix
A pull here means the rows a backlink tool returns when it lists the links pointing at a domain. People who verify backlinks track the label as one status among several. One French-language verifier thread records each link's source page and target URL, then places nofollow and UGC markers beside the live, removed and missing-page states, because each of those rows leads to a different next step.
Work a pull in three passes.
- Split by label before counting anything. Group the rows into follow, nofollow, sponsored and ugc, keeping combined values such as
ugc nofollowvisible as both. A small export can be grouped by hand; a backlink tool's attribute filters do the same thing at scale. - Check the rows that change a decision. A nofollow or sponsored label means credit withheld through that link, and the target stays discoverable through a sitemap or another link. Before judging a labeled row, confirm the destination still loads and the mention is still on the source page: a live labeled link keeps its visit and citation value.
- Give high-reach nofollows a traffic note. When the source page has a real audience, log the visit path next to the label: who could click through, and whether that audience goes on to cite what it reads.
Then read the overall mix. A profile that is all follow is the one to question, since that's the footprint Semrush's guide flags as unnatural.
