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What Is a Nofollow Link? (A Simple Guide for Beginners)

Updated: Sep 04, 2026
Author By Sherise Saavedra
LinkedIn

Marking a link nofollow takes one click. Deciding whether it needs marking is the part that stalls people.

Most of that hesitation comes from what the word suggests — that nofollow stops Google from following a link at all. It doesn’t. Nofollow is a signal you send Google, not a switch you flip.

That distinction decides which links genuinely need the attribute and which ones are fine left alone. In my experience, the harder habit isn’t remembering to mark a paid link — it’s not marking every outbound one.

This is a beginner’s guide to nofollow links for WordPress site owners who link out, run affiliate links, or take sponsored placements.

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In This Article

A nofollow link is an ordinary link with one extra instruction attached: rel="nofollow". Your readers can’t tell the difference. They click it and land on the same page either way.

The difference is in how search engines read it. They discover new pages by crawling links, following the links on one page to find the next — and that discovery is where search engine visibility starts. They also treat each link as a vote of confidence in the page it points to.

Google’s name for scoring those votes is PageRank — how important a page looks based on the links pointing at it.

A link attribute is a short piece of code inside the link tag that describes the link. rel="nofollow" says: I’m linking here, but I’m not vouching for it.

Here’s a plain link in HTML:

<a href="https://www.example.com/contact">Text</a>

And the same link with the nofollow attribute added:

<a href="https://www.example.com/contact" rel="nofollow">Text</a>

There’s a page-level version of nofollow that’s easy to confuse with this one. A <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> tag in a page’s <head> covers every link on that page at once. The attribute in this guide works one link at a time.

Marking a link doesn’t hide the destination from search either. Google can still reach that page through other links — see our guide on getting Google to index your website.

So when you’re weighing an attribute, the question isn’t whether Google can reach the page. It’s whether you want to be counted as recommending it.

Dofollow gets talked about as though it’s something you add. It isn’t — every link you insert is dofollow already, and there’s no rel="dofollow" attribute to type. It’s simply the word people use for a plain, unmarked link.

The practical difference is narrower than it sounds. Here’s what stays the same:

  • Both are clickable and look identical on the page.
  • Both send referral traffic when someone clicks through.
  • Both can be crawled, so the destination page is still findable.

The one thing that changes is whether the search engine counts your link as a recommendation for the page it points to. Google counts a plain link; a nofollow link asks it not to.

That’s a signal you’re sending rather than a rule you’re enforcing. Our guide on domain authority explains how link signals feed into third-party scores like that.

Nofollow used to be the only option, so it got used for everything — paid links, blog comments, and links you’d rather not endorse. Google couldn’t tell those cases apart.

In September 2019, Google introduced two more link attributes so you could say which kind of link you meant. Here’s what each of the three is for:

  • rel=”sponsored” — for links you were paid to include, such as advertisements, paid placements, and affiliate links.
  • rel=”ugc” — for links inside user-generated content (UGC), like blog comments and forum posts. It keeps a reader’s spammy submission from reading as a recommendation from you.
  • rel=”nofollow” — the general-purpose option for when the other two don’t fit and you’d rather not be counted as recommending the destination.

The attributes also stack, which trips people up because it looks like you have to choose one. Switch on two and both get written into the same link:

<a href="https://example.com/offer" rel="nofollow sponsored">Sponsored partner offer link.</a>

My advice: pick the attribute that most accurately describes the link, and add nofollow alongside it if you want to be explicit.

The attribute doesn’t work the way its name implies, and it hasn’t for years.

Google announced sponsored and ugc in September 2019, along with a change to how it reads all three. From March 1, 2020, it began treating them as hints for ranking and indexing rather than absolute directives.

A hint is something Google takes into account when it decides; a directive is something it follows automatically. The attributes are now the first kind.

In practice, that means you’re signaling, not commanding. You tell Google how you’d like a link treated, and what it does with that is its call. See Google’s own guidance on qualifying outbound links for how it describes the attributes today.

That reframes the usual question of whether nofollow links are worth having. Their value doesn’t come from PageRank at all — it comes from three other things:

  • Referral traffic — a click is a click, and visitors arriving through a nofollow link show up in your referral traffic reports the same way.
  • Brand exposure — a mention on a busy site puts you in front of an audience that hadn’t heard of you.
  • A natural-looking link profile — real sites accumulate a mix of marked and unmarked links.

So mark your links honestly, then judge a placement on whether people actually click it rather than on which attribute it carries.

This is the part that makes site owners anxious, and there’s one case where the anxiety is justified. Google’s spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking signals as a violation. An unmarked paid link can draw a manual action — a penalty a reviewer at Google applies by hand.

Marking those links is what keeps you on the right side of it. Here’s when an attribute is called for:

  • Paid and sponsored placements — anything you were compensated for, including sponsored posts and display ads. Use sponsored.
  • Affiliate links — affiliate marketing pays you a commission, which makes it a paid link. Use sponsored, or nofollow.
  • Comments, forums, and reader submissions — use ugc so a link someone else dropped on your site isn’t read as your endorsement.
  • Sources you’re citing but not endorsing — a claim you’re disputing, an unverified source, a site you’d rather not vouch for. Use nofollow.

If you want a single rule: if money changed hands, mark the link. That covers most of what worries publishers.

The attribute is designed to describe a specific relationship — paid, reader-submitted, or unendorsed. Use it everywhere and it stops telling Google anything useful, including on the links where you need it most.

Three habits are worth reviewing on your own site:

  • Blanket-marking every external link — an understandable instinct, and one that flattens the difference between a paid placement and a citation you were glad to make.
  • Nofollow on your own internal links — internal links are how search engines work out which of your pages matter most.
  • Marking genuine editorial citations — a link to a study, a documentation page, or a post you found useful is doing the job links exist to do.

A good default: leave your links plain unless one of the reasons in the previous section applies. If you can’t name which reason it is, that’s usually your answer.

WordPress can add a nofollow attribute on its own, though it sits a few clicks in. Add the link as usual, then select it again and click the Edit link button in the popover.

Expand Advanced and you’ll find three checkboxes: Open in new tab, Mark as nofollow, and Additional CSS class(es). Check the middle one, click Apply, and the attribute is in.

Advanced section of the WordPress link popover showing the Mark as nofollow checkbox

What core doesn’t give you is sponsored or ugc. For a publisher marking paid placements and reader-submitted links, those are the two that matter. That’s what an SEO plugin adds.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the one I use. Once it’s active it replaces those checkboxes with four toggles of its own, shown directly in the link popover instead of behind Advanced. So the steps below happen in the editor you already know, not on a separate plugin screen.

Install and activate it and the options are there, with nothing to configure first. If you’re still deciding, see our list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress.

Start in the block editor, which is the path most people take. Select the words you want to link, then click the link icon in the block toolbar. The shortcut is Cmd+K on a Mac, Ctrl+K on Windows.

With AIOSEO active, the popover that opens carries the URL field and, directly below it, four toggles in this order: Open in new tab, Add “nofollow” to link, Add “sponsored” to link, and Add “ugc” to link.

Under those sits a text field, Add title attribute to link. The first two toggles cover what core already offered; the sponsored and ugc options and the title field are AIOSEO’s additions.

Link popover in the WordPress block editor with the nofollow toggle switched on

The order is flexible. Flip a toggle before you paste the URL, or paste it and press Enter. The popover stays open with the destination and an Edit button, ready for the toggle.

The toggle turns blue, the attribute is written into the block, and there’s no save step. Update the post as usual and the attribute goes live with it.

Still on the Classic Editor? Select your text, click Insert/edit link, then click the gear icon labeled Link Options to open the full window. Add a URL, check the box for the attribute you need, then click Add Link.

The Title field is optional, and the checkboxes are independent, so you can check any combination. Classic spells the attributes out in full: Add rel=”nofollow” to link, Add rel=”sponsored” to link, and Add rel=”UGC” to link. Either way, both editors write the same attribute into your HTML.

Checking a link takes about five seconds, which makes auditing your older posts realistic — it’s a quick pass to fold into a wider SEO audit.

Right-click the link in your browser and choose Inspect. Your developer tools open with that link’s HTML highlighted, and you’re looking for rel= inside the <a> tag. If rel="nofollow" is there, the link is marked; if there’s no rel attribute at all, it’s a plain dofollow link.

To review a whole page at once, open the page source instead — Ctrl+U on Windows, or Cmd+Option+U on a Mac. Then search the code for nofollow with Ctrl+F.

Browser extensions do the same job visually, marking nofollow links as you browse — see our roundup of the best free SEO Chrome extensions.

When you audit an old post, work through the affiliate and sponsored links first. Those are the ones where a missing attribute actually matters.

Marking a link correctly answers Google’s question. It doesn’t answer yours: does anyone actually click it?

That’s a click question, and it’s the one MonsterInsights, the WordPress analytics plugin, was built to answer. Install it and connect it to Google Analytics with the setup wizard. From that moment on, clicks on your outbound and affiliate links are recorded.

There’s nothing to switch on and no code to add for those clicks. If you haven’t connected a property yet, see our guide on how to add Google Analytics to WordPress first.

To read the numbers, go to Insights » Reports in your WordPress dashboard and click the Publishers tab in the report navigation. It lands on the Publishers overview with both link tables already on the page.

The Top Outbound Links table ranks the external links your visitors clicked. It has two sortable columns, Links and Total Clicks, plus a Totals row.

The Links value is the link’s label as it appeared on the page, not the destination URL. The purple bar behind each row shows that row’s share of the total.

Top Outbound Links table showing each external link’s total clicks, sorted highest first, with link labels obscured

For more on how those clicks get recorded, see our guide on how to track outbound link clicks in GA4.

A sponsored link out to an advertiser’s site turns up in that same outbound table. Affiliate links get one of their own. Top Affiliate Links has three sortable columns — the label identifying the link, the destination, and total clicks — so this one names where the click went, while the outbound table names the link as it appeared on the page.

Top Affiliate Links table listing affiliate link labels, destinations and total clicks, with labels and URLs obscured

The Publishers report and affiliate link tracking come with MonsterInsights Plus and above. Affiliate clicks are tracked out of the box for the usual /go/ and /recommend/ paths. Cloaking yours behind something else means adding that path once under Insights » Settings » Publisher.

Our guide to affiliate link tracking in WordPress goes deeper on cloaked links. For download and button clicks too, see our guide on Google Analytics click tracking.

Marking a link tells Google how to treat it. The Publishers report tells you whether anyone clicked it — and that’s the number that decides whether a placement stays.

Find Out Which Links Are Worth Keeping

Once MonsterInsights is connected to Google Analytics, clicks on your outbound and affiliate links are already being recorded. Read the Publishers report instead of guessing which placements earn their spot.

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Not by passing PageRank — that’s the part the attribute asks Google to skip. They still help in other ways: referral traffic, brand exposure, and a profile that mixes marked and unmarked links. Since March 2020, Google has treated the attribute as a hint for ranking and indexing rather than a directive. Our guide on how to get backlinks covers how to earn both kinds.

I use them for paid and sponsored content, affiliate links, user-generated content like blog comments, and sources I’m citing without endorsing. Sponsored is the better fit when money changed hands, and ugc is for anything a reader submitted. Plain nofollow covers the rest.

Right-click the link, choose Inspect, and look for rel= inside the <a> tag. If you see rel="nofollow", the link is marked; no rel attribute at all means it’s a plain dofollow link. To check a full page, open the page source and search the code for nofollow.

Dofollow is just a plain link with no rel attribute — there’s nothing to add, since it’s the default. A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", which asks Google not to count it as a recommendation. Visitors experience both identically; the difference is only in how search engines read them.

I’d advise against it. Marking every outbound link makes the attribute meaningless on your site, and gives up the signal you’d otherwise send on a genuinely paid one. Save it for paid placements, affiliate links, reader submissions, and sources you’re citing without endorsing.

Nofollow links in your own content are normal, and plenty of large publishers apply them automatically to comments and paid placements. Used on the right links, the attribute keeps a paid placement inside Google’s spam policies. The risk runs the other way: an unmarked paid link is what can draw a manual action.

Now, when you add an affiliate or sponsored link, you’ll know whether it needs marking — and how to mark it without any code. If you liked this article, check out the following beginner-friendly guides:

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