Qualify your outbound links to Google
For certain links on your site, you might want to tell Google your relationship with the
linked page. In order to do that, use one of the following
rel
attribute values in the
<a>
tag.
For regular links that you expect Google to fetch and parse without any qualifications, you don't need
to add a
rel
attribute. For example:
<p>My favorite horse is the <a href="https://horses.example.com/Palomino">palomino</a>.</p>
For other links, use one or more of the following values:
rel
values
|
|
Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called
paid
links
) with the
sponsored
value. Read more about
Google's stance on paid links
.
<a
rel="sponsored"
href="https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese">Appenzeller</a>
|
rel="ugc"
|
We recommend marking user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum
posts, with the
ugc
value.
<a
rel="ugc"
href="https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese">Appenzeller</a>
If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you might remove this
attribute from links posted by members or users who have consistently made
high-quality contributions over time. Read more about how to
prevent user-generated spam your site and platform
.
|
rel="nofollow"
|
Use the
nofollow
value when other values don't apply, and you'd rather
Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site. For
links within your own site, use the
robots.txt
disallow
rule
.
<a
rel="nofollow"
href="https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese">Appenzeller</a>
|
Multiple values
|
You may specify multiple
rel
values as a space- or comma-separated
list.
Examples:
<p>I love <a
rel="ugc nofollow"
href="https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese">Appenzeller</a> cheese.</p>
<p>I hate <a
rel="ugc,nofollow"
href="https://cheese.example.com/blue_cheese">Blue</a> cheese.</p>
|
Links marked with these
rel
attributes will generally not be followed. Remember
that the linked pages may be found through other means, such as sitemaps or links from other
sites, and thus they may still be crawled. These
rel
attributes are used only in
<a>
elements that Google can crawl
,
except
nofollow
, which is also available as
robots
meta
tag
.
If you need to prevent Google from fetching a link to a page on your own site, use the
robots.txt
disallow
rule
.
To prevent Google from indexing a page, allow crawling and use the
noindex
robots rule
.