When to Use Nofollow Links on Your Own Site
Most guides cover links pointing at you. This one is about the links you publish — and getting them wrong is a policy problem, not an optimisation one.
Short answer
The one-line rule
If the link is an honest editorial endorsement, leave it followed. If it is not, mark it. Every case below is an application of that sentence. Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links says the same thing in more words.
Decision table
| Link type | Attribute |
|---|---|
| Advertisement or paid placement | sponsored |
| Affiliate link | sponsored (or nofollow) |
| Sponsored / gifted review | sponsored |
| Blog or news comment | ugc (often plus nofollow) |
| Forum post, user profile, user review | ugc |
| Unmoderated user submission | ugc nofollow |
| Source you are citing but disputing | nofollow |
| Press release distribution | nofollow |
| Editorial citation or reference | None — leave followed |
| Tool, partner or resource you recommend unpaid | None — leave followed |
| Your own other properties | None — leave followed |
Paid and incentivised links
Money, free product, discounted service, an exchange of value of any kind — all of it counts. A followed link that was paid for and not marked is a link scheme under Google's spam policies, and the penalty lands on both sites.
This cuts both ways when you buy: if someone sells "dofollow guest posts", they are selling you a policy violation. See white hat vs black hat.
User-generated content
Anywhere a stranger can publish a link — comments, reviews, forum threads, profile fields, submitted listings — mark it. The point is not that your users are spammers; it is that you cannot vouch for links you did not write, and spammers will find the field eventually.
A reasonable middle ground for engaged communities: ugc by default, upgraded to followed for trusted contributors above a reputation threshold. Stack Overflow and similar sites work roughly this way.
Untrusted or unvetted sources
Sometimes you need to link to something you are criticising, fact-checking, or warning readers about. Nofollow lets you cite it without endorsing it. Same for machine-generated outbound links, scraped data sources, or anything where volume prevents review.
Links to keep followed
Linking out to good sources costs you nothing. There is no fixed pool of authority that drains when you cite a study, and outbound links to relevant, credible pages help both readers and search engines understand your topic. Nofollowing everything external is a tell that someone read a 2010 blog post about PageRank sculpting.
The PageRank sculpting myth
The old tactic was to nofollow internal links to low-value pages to funnel authority into important ones. Google closed that in 2009: nofollowed links still consume their share of a page's outgoing authority, it just evaporates instead of flowing. Sculpting does not work, and never nofollow your own internal links to control crawling — use noindex, robots.txt, or canonicals for that.
Once your policy is set, spot-check it with the methods in the checking guide, and pick the precise attribute using sponsored vs ugc vs nofollow.
FAQ
What types of links should be nofollow?
Anything paid or incentivised (ads, sponsorships, affiliate links, gifted product reviews), anything submitted by users (comments, forum posts, profiles, reviews), and links to sources you cannot vouch for. Everything else can stay followed.
Should I nofollow all my outbound links?
No. Linking out to good sources is normal, useful for readers, and not a leak you need to plug. Nofollowing every external link looks unnatural and removes a signal that helps search engines understand your topic.
Do I need to nofollow affiliate links?
Yes. Google's guidance is that affiliate links should carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". This is separate from disclosing the relationship to readers, which is a legal requirement in many countries.
Put it into practice
Browse the directory to find the next backlink opportunity to act on.