Nofollow: A link attribute, rel="nofollow", that asks search engines not to associate your site with the page you link to or pass ranking signals to it. Google treats it as a hint rather than a rule.
What changed in 2019 and 2020
Until 2019, Google treated nofollow as an instruction: the link was ignored. In September 2019 it announced that nofollow, along with the new sponsored and ugc values, would be treated as hints for ranking straight away, and for crawling and indexing from 1 March 2020. In practice, a nofollowed link may or may not be followed or counted; Google decides.
Where to use it
- Paid and affiliate links:
sponsoredis preferred, though nofollow is still accepted. - Comments and forum posts:
ugc, for links that readers rather than you added. - Links you do not want to vouch for: nofollow, for example a link to a site you are criticising.
Internal links: leave it off
Nofollow on links between your own pages does not save ranking value for other links. For keeping crawlers out of parts of your own site, Google’s guidance on qualifying links points to robots.txt instead. And because it is only a hint, nofollow will not reliably keep a page out of the index either; that is a job for noindex.
To check a WordPress site, view the source of a few posts and search for nofollow, or run a crawler and filter for internal nofollow links. Common culprits are theme settings, old SEO plugin options and page-builder buttons with “nofollow” ticked. The internal linking strategy guide explains which internal links are worth having in the first place.