If you run a small site, say a fan page for a browser game, a hobby blog or a list of tools you like, you will sooner or later wonder whether your nofollow external links are set up right. The short version: most outbound links need nothing at all, paid links always need a label, and links your visitors post should get one too. Here is how to decide, link by link.
First, what the label does
rel="nofollow" on a link tells Google you would rather not have your site associated with the page you are linking to. Since 2019, Google has treated it as a hint rather than a strict order, according to its announcement that year. The same change introduced two more specific labels, sponsored and ugc, which now cover the cases nofollow used to handle on its own.
Visitors don't see any of this. The link looks and works the same for them.
A quick sorting guide for your outbound links
Go through the external links on your site and put each one in a box.
You recommend it, nobody paid you. A link to the game's official page, a guide you found useful, a friend's site you like. Leave it plain. Google's outbound links guide says regular links you expect it to fetch don't need any rel value.
You got something for it. Money, a free key or copy of a game, merchandise, a commission. Mark it rel="sponsored". Google's spam policies count paying for links with goods or services, and sending a product in exchange for a post with a link, as link spam unless the link is labeled. nofollow is also accepted here, but Google prefers sponsored.
A visitor posted it. Comments, guestbook entries, forum or Discord-style threads hosted on your site, user profiles. Mark these rel="ugc". Google suggests rel="ugc nofollow" if you also want to cover services that don't know the newer value. If someone has posted good, helpful material for a long time, Google says you can drop the label from their links.
You link to it but don't vouch for it. A page you are criticizing, a site you mention as an example of a scam, a source you doubt. That is what plain nofollow is for.
| Link | Label |
|---|---|
| Game's official site, useful guides | none |
| Affiliate store link | sponsored |
| Review of a game you got for free | sponsored |
| Link in a reader's comment | ugc (or ugc nofollow) |
| Link to a page you warn people about | nofollow |
What about links to your own pages
Leave them alone. For links within your own site, Google's guide points to a robots.txt rule if you need to stop crawling, not nofollow. Internal links are how both readers and search engines find your pages.
Common worries, answered
Will linking out without nofollow hurt my site? Not for normal, honest links. The risk Google describes is with paid links that aren't labeled.
Do I need to fix old nofollow links? No. Google said existing nofollow markup keeps working, including on paid links.
What if I pick the wrong label? Mostly harmless. Google said that marking a non-paid link as sponsored at most means it might not credit that link. Forgetting the label on a paid link is the mistake to avoid.
Does nofollow hide the page I link to? No. Google says linked pages can still be found through sitemaps and other sites, so nofollow is not a way to keep something private.
How to add the label
If your site builder lets you edit a link's attributes, put the value there. In raw HTML it looks like this:
<a href="https://store.example/game" rel="sponsored">buy it here</a>
Checking how other sites link to you
If your site has picked up links from other fan sites, forums or press, you may wonder how many of them are followed. The link lookup on seogeoaeo.ai lists the 100 strongest sites linking to a domain and, for each one, the share of its linking pages that are followed rather than nofollow. A run costs 70 credits, and it needs a paid plan, which starts at $29 a month, so for a hobby site it makes sense only if you also want the other checks. The numbers are estimates from a data provider and can't show which links Google counts.