Nofollow, dofollow, sponsored and UGC: which attributes actually count?

Nofollow and dofollow are two ways in which a link either passes authority to the page it points at or does not. The short answer: a regular link (dofollow) counts as a vote of confidence, while a nofollow link tells Google “I am linking here, but I do not vouch for this page”. Alongside those, two more specific variants have existed for a few years now, sponsored and ugc, which you use instead of or next to nofollow. In this article you will read what each attribute does exactly, when to deploy it and, more importantly, why micromanaging them delivers far less than most link building stories would have you believe.

What exactly are link attributes?

Every link on a web page is technically an <a> element with an href. To that element you can attach a rel attribute that gives search engines extra context about the relationship between your page and the page you link to. That is the heart of the matter: the rel attribute determines how a link is interpreted within the broader whole of SEO.

By default, a link needs no rel value at all to pass on authority. That is an important misconception: “dofollow” is not an attribute you add, it is simply what happens when you do nothing. You only add something when you specifically want to limit or nuance the passing of value.

Dofollow: the default you never have to write

A dofollow link is quite simply a normal link without any restriction. You do not have to write anything for it. When an authoritative domain links to you this way, it passes on part of its trust, which is one of the building blocks search engines use to determine how trustworthy your page is.

In practice this means that all internal links within your own website should be dofollow. You want the authority of your strongest pages to flow freely through your site to the pages that need to deliver conversions. Deliberately making internal links nofollow used to be a popular trick (“PageRank sculpting”), but that has not worked for a long time and today only costs you signal.

Nofollow: the original brake

The rel="nofollow" attribute has existed since 2005 and was introduced to combat comment spam. The message to search engines was simple: do not follow this link and do not pass any authority to it. Think of links in blog comments, in forum posts or to pages you have no editorial control over.

Since 2019, Google no longer treats nofollow as a hard command but as a hint. That means the search engine may decide for itself whether to still weigh the link for certain purposes, for example to understand your site better. For your day-to-day work that changes little: a nofollow link as a rule delivers no direct ranking value, but it can still deliver traffic and visibility if people actually click on it.

Sponsored and UGC: the two newer variants

When nofollow was converted into a hint, Google simultaneously introduced two more specific attributes. They let you indicate more precisely what kind of link you are placing:

• rel="sponsored" is what you use for links that are the result of a payment, a sponsorship or a commercial arrangement. Think of an advert, a paid article or an affiliate link.
• rel="ugc" stands for “user generated content” and is meant for links placed by your users: comments, forum posts, profiles.

You may combine these values, for example rel="ugc nofollow". Google sees them all as hints, not as laws. The underlying goal is that you give the search engine honest context about how a link came about, so that the algorithm gets a fuller picture of the web.

Which attributes actually “count”?

Here sits the nuance that gets lost in a lot of link building content. The question “does this link count?” is less black and white than tools suggest. A few honest starting points:

1. Dofollow links from relevant, authoritative domains are the most valuable. There is no discussion about that. This is the type of link that serious link building aims for.
2. Nofollow, sponsored and UGC generally pass on no direct authority, but they are not worthless. A nofollow mention on a busy page can deliver relevant traffic and brand awareness, and that in turn has indirect value.
3. A natural link profile always contains a mix. A website that only ever receives dofollow links looks suspicious to Google rather than strong. Real sites also organically pick up nofollow, comment and UGC links.

In other words: you do not have to “repair” every incoming nofollow link and you do not have to tag every outgoing link by hand as if your life depends on it. The system is more robust than that.

When attributes do become genuinely important

There is one situation where tagging things wrong can really cost you money: paid links. If you pay for a placement, a sponsored article or an affiliate deal and that link stays up as a regular dofollow, you are breaking Google’s guidelines. The search engine sees that as an attempt to buy rankings and can hand your site a manual penalty for it.

The solution is simple: if you pay for a link, put rel="sponsored" (or at least nofollow) on it. The same goes for links you receive in exchange for a product or service. This is not a technical detail but a matter of hygiene that belongs to every serious content strategy. An experienced SEO specialist builds this in as standard when assessing a link profile, precisely because a penalty is far more expensive than the link was ever worth.

How do you check the attributes of a link?

You do not have to buy tooling to see whether a link is nofollow or dofollow. Right-click the link in your browser, choose “inspect” and look at the <a> element. Is there no rel attribute, or a rel without nofollow, sponsored or ugc? Then it is a regular, authority-passing link. To check an entire page or site in bulk, professionals use a crawler, but for individual checks your browser does the job just fine.

Do you want to know which domains link to your competitors and not to you? Then a backlink gap analysis is a more logical next step than staring at individual rel tags. And if you want to understand what an incoming link is worth at all, look at the heading structure and context of the page it sits on, not just at the attribute.

The honest conclusion: context over attribute

Link attributes are genuinely important at two moments: with internal links (leave them dofollow) and with paid or placed links (tag them as sponsored or nofollow). Beyond that, micromanaging rel values is rarely where your growth comes from. The value of a link sits in the domain that places it, the traffic that comes across it and the trust it signals, not in a neatly filled-in attribute.

At Customer Impact we do not treat SEO as a game of tags, but as the acquisition layer of an orchestrating growth engine: links, content and technology work together to build pipeline, not to make vanity numbers rise in a tool. On top of that, we make sure you do not only rank in Google, but also get cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, where the same authority signals carry weight.

Want to know whether your link profile is moving you forward or quietly building up risk? Get in touch and we will look at it together.