Links
nofollow, sponsored and ugc
Values for a link's rel attribute that tell Google what kind of link it is. Since 2019 Google treats all three as hints rather than rules.
Also called rel=nofollow, rel=sponsored, rel=ugc, nofollow link · Sources checked 15 November 2026
Google's documentation lists three:
- sponsored for advertisements and paid placements.
- ugc for links in user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
- nofollow when neither applies and you would rather Google not associate your site with the linked page, or crawl it from yours.
An ordinary link needs no attribute. Since September 2019 Google has treated all three as hints about how to handle a link, not as instructions. For links between pages of your own site, Google says to use a robots.txt rule instead.
On the 34 sites whose outbound links we read on 14 November 2026, 14% of the links (96 of 702) carried one of the three.