Nofollow links are hyperlinks with the tag rel%3D “nofollow”. These links don't influence the ranking of the destination URL in search engines because Google doesn't transfer PageRank or anchor text between them. In fact, Google doesn't even crawl untracked links. Nofollow links are links to which a rel%3D nofollow HTML tag has been applied.
The nofollow tag tells search engines to ignore that link. Because nofollow links don't exceed PageRank, they probably won't affect search engine rankings. The nofollow attribute informs search engines not to follow the outbound link being tagged, which basically means that the website doesn't support the link. A rel attribute specifies the relationship between the page where the link is located and the page to which the link points.
Any link can have one or more associated rel attributes. A nofollow tag is a basic piece of HTML. Incorporated into a hyperlink, it allows webmasters to control whether search engines follow a link or not. By using the website, you can access social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The nofollow link attribute refers to links that have the value “nofollow” in their rel attribute. But untracked links? We don't know if it's just text on a page or if it's a link to anywhere or if it's just bold text in a paragraph. Although it's still technically incorrect, we'll be using the “nofollow” attribute throughout this document for reasons of simplicity and because it's the closest thing to using the correct terminology. Google wants these new attribute values to replace the use of the nofollow link attribute in certain cases and, therefore, express the true origin of the links. Google has implemented the sponsored link and UGC attributes to determine the origin of a nofollow link.
Implementing the nofollow tag allowed a website to maintain its ranking even if it received spam links. According to Google's webmaster guidelines, you shouldn't follow any links you pay for (or use the new “Rel%3DSponsorcined” attribute). A highly relevant link in the right place, followed or unfollowed, can attract interested visitors to your site and increase the reach of your audience and brand, which can be as valuable as the strength of the link. For example, if you pay for a banner ad on a website, Google requires that the banner link not be followed. They can come from Google Search, but they can also end up on your site through a link on a highly relevant page on someone else's website.
In the same article, Google later says that the new link attributes are suggestions that they can incorporate for classification purposes. The nofollow value of the rel link attribute is used to tell search engines that they should not follow these links and, therefore, they should not transmit any link authority to the link destination. However, landing pages may continue to appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow or if the URLs are sent to Google on a site map. In conclusion, understanding how nofollow tags work is essential for any SEO expert who wants to maximize their website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). By using nofollow tags correctly, webmasters can control which pages are crawled by search engine bots and which ones are not. This helps ensure that only relevant pages are indexed and ranked in SERPs.
