Nofollow

rel="nofollow" is added to a link to say: I am linking here, but do not count this as a vote. It was introduced to fight comment spam. Google later added two more specific attributes — rel="sponsored" for paid or affiliate links, and rel="ugc" for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. Since 2019 Google treats all three as hints rather than strict directives, meaning it may choose to consider them anyway.

Use sponsored on anything paid, affiliate, or exchanged for value — this is a disclosure matter, not an optimisation. Use ugc on comments and user-submitted links. Use plain nofollow when you are linking to something you do not want to vouch for. What you should not do is nofollow your own internal links to control crawling; that stopped being effective long ago, and noindex, canonicals, or robots.txt are the right tools depending on the goal. Note also that rel="noopener" and rel="noreferrer" are security and privacy attributes with no SEO effect — they get confused with these constantly.

The undisclosed paid link is the problem that actually costs clients. Digital PR, sponsored placements and affiliate content all accumulate links that should carry sponsored and often do not, and that is a manual-action risk landing on the brand rather than the agency. Bake attribution into the brief and audit acquired links periodically. The other senior judgement: do not overthink outbound nofollow. Linking generously to good sources — followed — is a credibility signal for readers and quality raters alike, and hoarding equity by nofollowing every external link is superstition, not strategy.