Glossary Terms

nofollow

Nofollow is a link attribute that tells search engines not to pass ranking credit to the page a link points to. You add it in the HTML as <code>rel="nofollow"</code>, and it was introduced jointly by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in 2005 to fight comment spam. It still has three honest uses: untrusted user content like comments, paid placements where you're not vouching for the destination, and any link you'd rather not endorse editorially. In 2019 Google turned it from a hard rule into a hint, and two more specific attributes have taken over part of its old job: <code>rel="sponsored"</code> for paid links and <code>rel="ugc"</code> for user-generated content.