A link marked with an attribute that signals search engines not to treat it as a standard editorial endorsement for ranking purposes.
It can still provide referral traffic, visibility, and user value.
Short and sweet:
A link marked with an attribute that signals search engines not to treat it as a standard editorial endorsement for ranking purposes.
It can still provide referral traffic, visibility, and user value.
See also: Backlink, Link Building, Off-Page SEO
A nofollow link carries a small HTML attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit to the page it points to, commonly used on paid links, comment sections, and other spots where a site owner doesn’t want to vouch for the destination’s quality. It still allows a human visitor to click through normally, so the restriction is invisible to anyone browsing the page and only matters to how search engines calculate authority. Sites that fail to mark paid or user-submitted links this way risk violating a search engine’s guidelines, since the tag exists partly to prevent link schemes from artificially inflating rankings.
Wikipedia marks nearly every outbound citation as a nofollow link, which is why simply getting mentioned there doesn’t automatically boost a site’s search rankings the way an editorial backlink might.
A blogger reviewing a product might use this same attribute when linking to a sponsor’s website, disclosing the paid relationship while staying compliant with Google’s guidelines on sponsored content.
Comment sections on most WordPress blogs automatically apply it to any URL a visitor pastes, a spam-prevention measure that still lets curious readers click through.
