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Nofollow, sponsored and ugc: what link attributes tell Google

A link on another site can carry a rel attribute that tells search engines how to treat it. Founders meet the question when a directory, a marketplace or a link seller describes its links as dofollow. This guide sums up what Google's documentation says about each value, what Domain Rating and similar scores measure, and how to read the attribute of any link in a few seconds.

A link written as a plain <a href="..."> has no rel attribute. People call it dofollow, although no such value exists: it is a link Google may follow and use as a signal. To qualify a link, Google's documentation lists three values. sponsored marks advertisements and paid placements. ugc marks user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. nofollow covers the other cases, when you would rather Google not associate your site with the linked page, or not crawl it from yours.

Values can be combined in one attribute, separated by spaces or commas, for example rel="sponsored nofollow". For paid links Google still accepts nofollow, and says sponsored is preferred.

Since 2019, all three are hints

When Google introduced sponsored and ugc on 10 September 2019, it also changed how it reads nofollow. Until then, a nofollow link was never counted as a signal in its algorithms. Since then the three values are hints, weighed with other signals for ranking, and from 1 March 2020 nofollow also became a hint for crawling and indexing.

The same announcement answers two practical questions. Existing nofollow links do not need to be changed, and a link may carry more than one value, such as rel="ugc sponsored". It also points out that nofollow was never a recommended way to keep a page out of the index: Google's help pages describe the mechanisms meant for that.

Google's spam policies list as link spam "buying or selling links for ranking purposes". The same list includes excessive link exchanges, "low-quality directory or bookmark site links", links widely distributed in the footers or templates of many sites, and requiring a link in terms of service or a contract without letting the other site qualify it.

In practice, a link that was paid for should carry sponsored, or at least nofollow. A directory or a blog that sells a followed link is selling what those policies describe as link spam, and the site that buys it shares the risk.

What Domain Rating measures

Domain Rating (DR) is a score made by Ahrefs, not by Google. Ahrefs says it "shows the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to the others in our database", on a 100-point scale. Each linking domain splits its own rating equally among the domains it links to, so a link from a site that links out to thousands of others counts for little in the score.

Other SEO tools publish their own scores with their own formulas, such as Moz's Domain Authority and Semrush's Authority Score, so one site gets a different number from each. Ahrefs itself says DR follows Google rankings less closely than URL Rating, its score for a single page. Use one tool consistently to compare two link prospects, and keep in mind that a high score says nothing about whether the page that links to you has readers.

On the page that links to you, right-click the link and choose Inspect: the browser shows the <a> tag, with any rel attribute inside it. On a long page, viewing the source and searching for your domain gives the same answer. Check again after a few weeks: sites change their templates, and a followed listing can become nofollow without notice.

Google Search Console has a Links report with the sites that link to you most, your most linked pages and the most common link text. Google says the report is not a comprehensive list of every link, so read it as a sample.

What this means for a codenation listing

Listing a tool on codenation is free, and every link from a listing to the tool carries rel="nofollow". The one sponsored block a page can hold, when someone pays for it, is labelled Sponsored and its link carries rel="sponsored nofollow". A listing here is worth the visitors it sends.

Sources

Read on 27 October 2026.