Do rel=nofollow, sponsored, and ugc Links Still Work the Way You Think?

Google's rel="nofollow" attribute stopped being a directive on March 1, 2020. Since then, nofollow, along with the newer sponsored and ugc values, is treated as a hint, something Google's systems can weigh during crawling, indexing, and ranking rather than a rule they're obligated to obey. A large share of the advice still circulating about these attributes describes the pre-2020 behavior, where a nofollow link was guaranteed to pass no ranking signal at all. That guarantee doesn't exist anymore.

What Each Attribute Actually Means

Google's current documentation on qualifying outbound links defines three distinct rel values, each meant for a different situation, not three interchangeable ways of saying "don't count this link":

Google's own phrasing for nofollow is specific: use it when you'd rather Google "not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site." That's a slightly different job than sponsored or ugc, which exist to disclose the nature of a link rather than to withhold association from it. Picking the attribute that actually matches the situation, rather than defaulting to nofollow for everything, is what the current guidance is actually asking for.

Where nofollow Came From

Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Microsoft's search engine at the time) jointly announced the nofollow attribute on January 18, 2005, as a coordinated response to comment spam. In the early 2000s, automated spam comments carrying keyword-rich anchor text were a real manipulation vector, since every link functioned as a vote in the original PageRank model, and a few thousand successful spam comments could measurably move rankings. Blog platforms, including WordPress and Movable Type, added nofollow to comment links within days of the announcement, and the fact that all three major search engines adopted it together is what actually gave it force: a spammer couldn't route around the attribute by targeting a different search engine, since none of them counted the link either way.

For roughly 15 years after that, nofollow functioned as a hard directive: a nofollow link was excluded from PageRank calculations entirely, full stop. That's the behavior an enormous amount of still-circulating SEO advice describes, and it was accurate for a long time. It just isn't the current rule.

The 2019 Shift From Directive to Hint

Google announced the change on September 10, 2019, in a Search Central blog post titled "Evolving 'nofollow': new ways to identify the nature of links." The post introduced the sponsored and ugc values alongside a direct statement about all three: "All the link attributes, sponsored, ugc, and nofollow, are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search." That hint-based treatment applied to ranking starting immediately, and Google specified a second, later date, March 1, 2020, for when nofollow would also become a hint for crawling and indexing purposes rather than a strict exclusion.

Google's stated rationale was about link-scheme detection, not about being more generous to nofollow links. With nofollow no longer an absolute wall, Google's systems can incorporate data from a wider set of links, including their anchor text, when evaluating link patterns in aggregate, which the company said helps identify manipulative link schemes it previously couldn't see at all because those links were excluded from consideration entirely.

What "Hint" Actually Means in Practice

A hint is not the same as "Google now follows and counts every nofollow link." The practical shift is narrower and easy to overstate in either direction:

• A nofollow, sponsored, or ugc link still typically won't be crawled or credited the way an unqualified link is. Google's own qualify-outbound-links documentation states plainly that links marked with these attributes "will generally not be followed."
• The linked page can still end up crawled and indexed through an entirely separate path, a sitemap, an internal link, a link from a different site, regardless of how you've qualified the link pointing to it from your page. The attribute governs Google's treatment of that specific link, not whether the destination page can be discovered at all.
• Google retains discretion to consider a hinted link during ranking or spam evaluation when it's useful for that purpose, which is the actual mechanism the 2019 change introduced. This is closer to Google saying "we reserve the right to look" than "we now count these the same as any other link."

When to Use Each Attribute, and How to Combine Them

The decision tree Google's own guidance implies is straightforward: ask what kind of link this is before defaulting to any single attribute.

1. Is money or compensation involved? Affiliate links, paid guest post placements, and sponsored content links get rel="sponsored". Google explicitly states existing nofollow links on this kind of content don't need to be changed, but sponsored is the preferred, more precise value going forward.
2. Did a user, not you, create this content? Comments, forum posts, and reviews containing links get rel="ugc", since that value exists specifically to flag content your site didn't author but is hosting.
3. Neither of the above, but you still don't want to vouch for the destination? That's what plain rel="nofollow" remains for.
4. Is it more than one of these at once? Google's documentation confirms multiple rel values can be combined as a space- or comma-separated list. A paid guest-post comment section, for example, could reasonably carry rel="ugc sponsored" on a link a commenter added as part of a compensated arrangement.

For a completely ordinary outbound link, one you're not being paid for, didn't come from user content, and are happy to vouch for, no rel attribute is needed at all. Google's guidance is explicit that regular links don't require any qualification, and adding nofollow reflexively to every outbound link is a dated practice from before this distinction existed, not a current best practice.

What Your CMS Might Already Be Doing Automatically

Some of this may already be happening on a site without anyone configuring it. WordPress core added a wp_rel_ugc() function in version 5.3, released in November 2019, which applies rel="nofollow ugc" to comment author links and links inside comment content by default, matching Google's own recommendation for the exact use case. A site running WordPress 5.3 or later with default comment settings is very likely already applying the ugc attribute correctly without any manual work, which is worth checking before assuming it needs to be added.

That default has also become a point of friction for some site owners specifically because it stacks nofollow onto every comment link automatically, including comments from genuinely trustworthy sources, and several plugins exist purely to override or remove that default behavior. Whether that's the right call for a given site depends on how much a site trusts its own comment section, but it's a decision worth making deliberately rather than discovering after the fact that a CMS default already made it.

Auditing Your Site's Existing Link Attributes

A quick audit catches most real problems without needing specialized tooling:

1. Check whether affiliate or paid links are actually marked. View source (or use a browser extension that highlights rel attributes) on a page with affiliate or sponsored links and confirm they carry sponsored, not a bare unqualified link. An unmarked paid link is the case most worth fixing, since it's the one Google's guidance treats as a genuine disclosure gap rather than a stylistic choice.
2. Check what your comment or forum system actually outputs. Inspect the rendered HTML of a comment link, not just the CMS settings screen, since plugin defaults can silently override core behavior in either direction.
3. Look for blanket nofollow rules applied site-wide by an old SEO plugin default, a common leftover from pre-2019 configurations. If every single outbound link on a site carries nofollow regardless of context, that's worth revisiting against the current, more specific guidance rather than treating it as a fixed setting.
4. Confirm internal links never carry nofollow by accident. These attributes are meant for external, paid, or user-submitted links. A nofollow attribute accidentally applied to internal navigation links (sometimes introduced by an overly broad plugin rule) can interfere with how Google discovers a site's own pages through internal linking.

Common Mistakes This Creates

A few patterns show up repeatedly on sites that haven't updated their approach since before 2019:

• Blanket nofollow on every external link, a leftover habit from an era when SEOs worried any outbound link "leaked" value. Since ordinary links don't need qualification at all, this pattern usually just obscures which links are genuinely paid or user-generated, the actual information these attributes are meant to convey.
• Treating sponsored links as invisible to Google. A sponsored link is still a real, crawlable URL from Google's perspective; the attribute discloses the relationship, it doesn't hide the link's existence.
• Assuming nofollow guarantees a linked page stays uncrawled. As covered above, the destination can still be reached and indexed through other paths entirely independent of how one specific link to it was qualified.
• Confusing this with the separate noindex directive. rel="nofollow" is about how a specific outgoing link is treated. noindex is a different mechanism entirely, applied to a page itself (via meta tag or HTTP header) to keep that page out of the index. See crawling vs. indexing for how that distinction plays out with Search Console's reporting.

The underlying principle connects to how Google treats other structural signals discussed elsewhere on this site: a redirect, a canonical tag, and now a link attribute are all things Google's documentation describes as hints or signals of varying strength, not commands it's contractually bound to execute exactly as written. See 301 redirects and link equity and canonical tags explained for the same pattern applied to other parts of a site's link and URL structure.

Related: 301 redirects and link equity, canonical tags and canonicalization explained, crawling vs. indexing.