Nofollow link

What changed in 2019, and why it still catches people out

Nofollow was introduced in 2005 for one job: killing the incentive to spam blog comments. For fourteen years the rule was simple — a nofollowed link passed nothing, full stop.

In September 2019 Google changed that. It announced two new attributes and reclassified all three as hints: signals Google considers when deciding how to treat a link, rather than instructions it must obey. The change applied to ranking immediately; for crawling and indexing, Google set 1 March 2020. The reasoning was that links carry useful information about language and context, and discarding all of it was wasteful.

This matters commercially, because half the link market still sells on the old model — "dofollow guaranteed", as though follow status and value were the same thing. They've never been further apart. The wider comparison sits in dofollow vs nofollow.

The three attributes and when each applies

You'll see all three in the wild, often used interchangeably by people who haven't read the documentation. They're not interchangeable, and using the right one is both a compliance question and a clarity one.

• You can combine them — rel="sponsored nofollow" is valid and is what cautious publishers use on paid placements.
• Using nofollow where sponsored belongs isn't a violation on its own, but sponsored is the clearer disclosure and the one Google asked for.

Do nofollow links do anything?

For rankings, directly: no promise and no way to verify. Google treats the attribute as a hint, so the honest answer is "sometimes, possibly, and you'll never know which".

Indirectly, quite a lot. Nofollow links send referral traffic, and referral traffic converts. They put your brand in front of the linking site's audience, they get seen by journalists, and a profile made entirely of followed links looks assembled rather than earned.

There's an Indian version of this that costs founders money. Many major Indian news sites nofollow outbound links as policy, including on the branded content they sell. So a ₹60,000 "national media placement" often delivers a nofollowed link. That can still be worth ₹60,000 — for the audience and the credibility — but not for the reason it was sold to you.

Disclosing paid links properly

Google's link spam policy is direct: exchanging money, goods or services for a link that passes ranking credit is a link scheme. The fix isn't secrecy, it's the attribute — mark it sponsored and you're compliant. Sellers resist because the attribute removes the exact property they charged for, which tells you what you were buying.

In India there's a second obligation that has nothing to do with Google. ASCI's influencer advertising guidelines require material connections in paid promotion to be disclosed to the audience — a label a human can see, not just an HTML attribute. Running paid content or creator partnerships, you owe both.

This is the part guest posting marketplaces quietly skip. The way we build links instead is slower and it survives audits.

When to nofollow your own outbound links

Less often than people do. Nofollowing everything you link to is a superstition left over from the era of PageRank sculpting, and it doesn't work as imagined: nofollowed links still consume their share of a page's outgoing value, which is then discarded rather than redirected. You lose it, nobody gains it — the mechanics are in link equity.

• Do nofollow paid and affiliate links (sponsored), user-submitted links (ugc), and sites you're citing as an example of something bad.
• Don't use nofollow to control crawling. Since March 2020 it's a hint there too. Use robots.txt to block crawling and noindex to keep a page out of the index.
• Don't nofollow internal links to hoard value. It evaporates the share rather than redistributing it.