Introduced in 2005 to address link spam, nofollow qualifies a link’s relationship to its destination. Google later introduced more specific attributes: rel=“sponsored” for paid or affiliate links and rel=“ugc” for user-generated links. These annotations are treated as hints rather than absolute crawling blocks. Qualifying links to untrusted sites and paid placements helps distinguish editorial endorsements from relationships that could otherwise create link-spam risks.
Some websites are seeing sharp increases in site: operator queries in Search Console performance reports. Explore possible causes, measurement effects and diagnostic responses.
