NoFollow Links Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

When you add links on your website you can either DoFollow or NoFollow those links.
NoFollow links are the links on your webpage that do not pass any link juice or ranking credit to the linked page. This can be done by adding an attribute rel="nofollow", also called as NoFollow tag, in hyperlinks available on your webpage.
<a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.example.com/">Example NoFollow link</a>

DoFollow links are the hyperlinks on your webpage which have not an rel="nofollow" attribute. These types of links pass link juice to the linked page.
<a href="https://www.example.com/">Example DoFollow link</a>

Initially, NoFollow was introduced in 2005 by Google to block spam-linked comments in blogs.
Till 2019 NoFollow links were used to block, by using rel="nofollow" tag, user-generated comments, sponsored advertisement links, and any suspected website.

In September 2019 2 more attributes were introduced rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" to identify sponsored or advertisement links and user-generated links. rel="nofollow" is being used only for those links which go to pages with which you don’t want to share your link juice.

No, it’s not necessary to NoFollow all external links available on your webpages. You should use rel="nofollow" attribute only if you don’t have trust in the linked page but still you need to use this link as per the need within your content.

NoFollow was created by Google in 2005. A new attribute rel=nofollow was introduced to stop linked blog comment spamming.

Affiliate links are a type of advertisement links that you promote through your website or social media platforms. To NoFollow affiliate link, you should prefer to use rel="sponsored" attribute as Google evolved NoFollow in 2019.

Sometimes you may implement NoFollow on your internal links too. There may be some webpages on your website which you don’t want to show in search results like login pages or your own blog comments in reply to your users. But always remember the page which you don’t want to rank should have NoIndex implemented on that page in addition to NoFollow implemented on internal links to that page.

The primary purpose of bringing NoFollow was to direct Google not to follow external links. Still, you can use NoFollow on some internal links too as highlighted above.

NoFollow links don’t hurt your website rankings. So you can leverage NoFollow links to bring some traffic to your website but avoid doing this with a huge number of links.

Google can identify and penalize you if you are using NoFollow links excessively to generate traffic as it’s termed as spamming. So don’t make it a regular practice with the sole purpose of generating traffic.

Links shared on Facebook are NoFollow. But still, these links are valuable as they bring traffic to your website.

Yes, links in Tweets are NoFollow. But these links help to bring traffic to your website so these are valuable.

Yes, guest post links should be NoFollow. As John Mueller highlighted in his Tweet:
“Essentially if the link is within the guest post, it should be nofollow, even if it’s a “natural” link you’re adding there.” as Tweeted by John Mueller.

NoFollow links don’t pass the link juice to the destination website. But still NoFollow links are valuable as these links bring traffic to the linked website.

Yes all external links in Wikipedia have rel="nofollow" attribute. Here on Wikipedia, you can see the reasons highlighted for using the NoFollow tag on external links. Reasons include depreciating links of spammers and preventing such legitimate links from influencing the page ranking of the websites they target.