Nofollow link
A link marked with rel="nofollow", which tells Google you'd rather it not associate your site with the linked page, or crawl that page from your site.
Also called rel="nofollow".
A link’s rel value tells Google your relationship with the page it points to: sponsored for ads and paid placements, ugc for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts, and nofollow when the other values don’t apply (Google Search Central). A link can carry more than one, such as rel="ugc nofollow". A regular link that you expect Google to fetch needs no rel value.
What nofollow doesn’t do
Google says links marked this way “will generally not be followed”, but the pages they point to may still be crawled if Google finds them another way, such as a sitemap or links from other sites.
To stop Google fetching a page on your own site, Google points you to a robots.txt disallow rule instead. To keep a page out of its index, allow crawling and use the noindex rule.
Paid links
For ads and paid placements, Google prefers sponsored, and says nofollow is still an acceptable way to mark them.
Related terms
Tools for it
Sources
Updated Oct 8, 2026.