Digital Lexicon Hub

The rel values nofollow, sponsored and ugc, which tell search engines a link is untrusted, paid or user-generated and not an editorial endorsement.

Correctly qualifying paid placements, affiliate links and comment links keeps a site within Google's link spam policies and protects both the publisher and the advertiser from ranking penalties.

A media site adds rel="sponsored" to all links in 220 paid partner articles through a CMS template, applies rel="ugc nofollow" to forum and comment links, and removes ugc for 12 trusted long-term contributors.

Google treats these values as hints, so a nofollow link may still be crawled or considered, and nofollow does not keep a page out of the index. A Noindex rule or a robots.txt disallow is needed for that purpose.

Google introduced sponsored and ugc in 2019 alongside nofollow and treats all three as hints rather than strict directives. Values can be combined, such as rel="ugc nofollow", and apply only to crawlable elements. Linked pages may still be found through sitemaps or links from other sites. A page-level robots meta nofollow rule also exists. Typical uses are User-Generated Content (UGC), ads and affiliate links, separate from Noindex.