Nofollow
In one line
Nofollow is a rel attribute on a link telling search engines not to pass link equity along that link.
Going deeper
Nofollow was originally introduced to keep equity from leaking through untrusted links like blog comments. It has since split into rel="sponsored" for ads and rel="ugc" for user-generated content.
Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a strict rule, meaning some equity can still flow. That makes the old trick of nofollowing internal links to sculpt PageRank effectively obsolete.
The practical rule is straightforward: tag untrusted or sponsored links with the right rel value, and leave genuine recommendations as plain dofollow links.
Sources
Related terms
Backlink
A backlink is an inbound link from another site to yours — one of the strongest signals search engines use to gauge a domain's authority and trustworthiness.
SEOLink Equity
Link equity (often called 'link juice') is the authority and ranking signal a page passes to another page through a link.
SEOnoindex / nofollow
noindex tells search engines not to add a page to the index, while nofollow tells them not to follow a specific link — both are page-level robots directives.
SEOLink Building
Link building is the deliberate marketing, content and outreach work that earns inbound backlinks from other sites to yours.
SEODA / Domain Rating
DA (Moz) and DR (Ahrefs) are third-party scores from 0 to 100 that estimate a domain's backlink authority — they are tool metrics, not Google scores.
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