The „nofollow attribute“ is an important element in the Search engine optimization (SEO), to Search engine crawlers Instructions for handling certain Hyperlinks to give. It was introduced by Google in 2005 to give webmasters control over the so-called „Link Juice“ (the link power inherited via links or PageRank) and to counteract spam techniques.
A link without special marking is usually treated as a „dofollow link“, which means that search engines can follow it, crawl the linked page and pass on link power to it. The nofollow attribute, on the other hand, originally signaled that a link should not be followed in order not to transfer PageRank and not to make the linked page relevant for the Ranking to be used.
Functionality and syntax
The nofollow attribute is entered directly in the HTML code of a hyperlink. The most common method is the link-specific use within the -Tags.
<a href="https://www.beispiel.de" rel="nofollow">Example link</a>Alternatively, the attribute can also be set page-wide in the meta robots tag in the header (<head>) of an HTML document. This instructs search engines not to follow any links on this entire page.
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />It is important to understand that a nofollow link affects the transfer of link power, but does not prevent users from following the link or the linked page from appearing in the Index of the search engine if it is accessible via other channels (e.g. other links marked „Dofollow“ or sitemaps).
Development of the hint attribute and other types
A significant change in the handling of the nofollow attribute took place in September 2019 and March 2020. Since then, Google no longer treats `rel=“nofollow“` as a strict directive, but as a hint. This means that Google can decide to follow such links in individual cases and use them for Ranking purposes to use. This adjustment enables Google to better analyze links and to identify unnatural links. Link pattern more efficiently.
As part of this change, two additional link attributes were introduced to give search engines more specific information about the type of link:
rel="sponsored"This attribute should be used for links that have been created as part of advertising, sponsorship or other paid agreements.rel="ugc"(User Generated Content): This attribute is intended for links in user-generated content, such as comments in blogs or posts in forums.
It is possible and in many cases advisable to combine these attributes, for example rel="nofollow sponsored", especially as not all search engines fully support the new attributes. For links that do not fall into any of the „sponsored“ or „ugc“ categories, but should not be considered an editorial recommendation, the following remains rel="nofollow" continues to be the right choice. Paid links must be marked with `nofollow` or `sponsored`. If links from trustworthy sources are marked as `nofollow`, this may also have a positive effect on search engine optimization.
