a nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", an attribute added in 2005 so that sites drowning in comment spam could keep publishing links without endorsing them. the important thing to know in 2026 is that its meaning changed: since 2019 google has described nofollow as a hint it may choose to consider rather than an instruction to ignore the link entirely. most advice still written about nofollow predates that change.
sponsored for paid, ugc for user-generated, nofollow for everything else. no attribute at all is the editorial endorsement, and that default is the one that matters most.
the attributes, and when each applies
<a href="..." rel="nofollow"> general purpose, since 2005 <a href="..." rel="sponsored"> paid, affiliate, advertising (2019) <a href="..." rel="ugc"> comments, forums, user posts (2019) combinable, and often correct to combine: <a href="..." rel="sponsored nofollow"> the default - no rel at all - is the editorial endorsement.
the 2019 split was not cosmetic. before it, one attribute had to cover an advertisement, a forum signature, and a link to a site you simply did not want to vouch for, which told search engines almost nothing about why the link was marked. separating the reasons gives them more to work with, which is also why using the specific attribute is better than defaulting everything to nofollow.
do they help
the honest answer has a floor and a ceiling, and the space between them is not knowable from outside.
the floor: nofollowed links still send real people to your site, still put your name in front of an audience, and frequently appear on exactly the sites that never give followed links to anyone. wikipedia, major news comment sections, large forums. treating those as worthless because of an attribute is a category error, because the traffic and the exposure do not care about the markup.
the ceiling: because google calls it a hint, these links may be considered in ranking. how often, and how much, is not published by anyone. any article giving you a percentage invented it. plan as though the ranking contribution is small and uncertain, and take them for the reasons that are certain.
what to do on your own outbound links
- paid gets
sponsored. this is a disclosure question before it is an SEO question, and undisclosed paid links are the actual risk. - comments and submissions get
ugc. this is what it exists for. - ordinary editorial links get nothing. linking to sources you genuinely recommend is what publishing looks like. hoarding link equity by nofollowing everything you cite was never demonstrated to work and makes your pages worse.
why some tools cannot report this at all
this is the part usually left out of nofollow guides, and it decides which tool can answer the question for you.
a rel attribute is a fact about one link on one page. it exists in the HTML. so any tool reporting followed versus nofollowed must be crawling and storing pages at that level of detail.
domain-level web graphs work one layer up. they record that news.org links to shop.com, rolled up across however many individual links produced that relationship, and the attributes do not survive the roll-up. the open common crawl hyperlink graph that this site runs on is one of those, so we can tell you which domains link to a competitor and not to you, and we cannot tell you which of those links are nofollowed. if that distinction is central to your work, a page-level commercial index is the correct tool and we will not pretend otherwise. the roll-up itself is worked through in what is a backlink graph.
a note on proportion
nofollow generates more anxiety than it deserves. it is one attribute on some of your links, its effect is a hint rather than a wall, and you control none of it on inbound links anyway. the question worth the attention is not what proportion of your links are followed. it is which credible domains link to your competitors and have never linked to you, which is a link gap and is entirely actionable.
faq
What is a nofollow link?
A nofollow link is a hyperlink carrying rel="nofollow", an attribute that tells search engines the linking site does not want to pass an endorsement to the destination. It was introduced in 2005 to fight comment spam. Since 2019 Google has treated it as a hint it may choose to consider rather than a strict instruction to ignore the link.
Do nofollow links help SEO?
They can, though not in the direct way a followed link does, and nobody outside the search engines can quantify it. Google describes nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, which leaves room for these links to be considered. Beyond ranking, they still send referral traffic, still put your name in front of an audience, and often sit on exactly the high-profile sites that never give followed links at all.
What is the difference between nofollow, sponsored and ugc?
They mark three different reasons a link should not read as a plain editorial endorsement. rel="sponsored" marks paid or advertising links, rel="ugc" marks user-generated content such as comments and forum posts, and rel="nofollow" remains the general-purpose case. All three were unified as hints in 2019, and you can combine them on one link.
Should I use nofollow on my outbound links?
Use sponsored for anything paid, because that is a disclosure obligation rather than an optimisation. Use ugc on comments and user submissions. Do not nofollow ordinary editorial links to sources you genuinely recommend: linking out to good material is normal publishing behaviour and hoarding link equity was never shown to work.
Can I see which of my backlinks are nofollow?
Only in tools that crawl and store pages, because rel attributes exist in the HTML of the linking page. Domain-level web graphs, including the open Common Crawl hyperlink graph, record which domain links to which without carrying the attributes of individual links, so a tool built on that layer cannot report followed versus nofollowed at all.
writes the queries we run internally. ships one tactical post a week.
plus one when a new common crawl release lands. that is all.