What is a Nofollow Attribute?
When a link on a web page has the rel=“no follow” attribute, it signals to search engine bots that the site linking to it does not endorse its content.
More About Nofollow Attributes
The nofollow attribute was developed by Google in 2005 to help website owners (but mostly bloggers) combat comment spam. It helped bloggers protect themselves from toxic link schemes and preserve their site’s credibility and rankings.
In 2020, the rel=“sponsored” and rel=“ugc” attributes were also created—these signal to search engine crawlers that web pages contain sponsored advertisements or user-generated content.
Along with the rollout of these new link attributes, Google announced that it would no longer disregard links with the nofollow attribute. It said that the nofollow attribute was no longer essential due to the development of other spam protection techniques.
However, in the new system, all three attributes provide crawlers with “hints” on how to be considered.
