A nofollow link is a link marked with the rel="nofollow" attribute, which asks supporting crawlers not to treat it as an ordinary endorsement of the destination page.
| Term | Nofollow Link |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | rel nofollow |
| Where it appears | Link analysis |
What it means in RankGear
In RankGear’s Link analysis, a link is flagged as nofollow when the provider reports a rel value of nofollow on the anchor. This lets you split the backlinks pointing at a page into those that pass an ordinary endorsement and those that carry the nofollow hint. The distinction shows up wherever the tool lists referring domains and individual links, so you can see at a glance how much of a page’s link profile is followed versus nofollowed.
How to interpret it
Treat the nofollow flag as a property reported by whichever backlink provider is enabled for the run, not as a verdict from Google. A high share of nofollow links is not automatically bad and a low share is not automatically good — the mix depends heavily on where the links come from, since large user-generated platforms, comment areas and many news sites apply nofollow by default. When you compare pages on this signal, compare only pages measured in the same run under the same provider so the counts are drawn from a consistent index.
Example
You open Link analysis for a product page and see 240 referring links, of which 90 are marked nofollow. Drilling in, most of those nofollowed links trace back to a forum thread and a couple of social profiles, while the followed links come from industry blogs and a supplier directory. That breakdown tells you the page’s followed profile is narrower than the raw total of 240 suggested, which is useful context when you weigh its authority against a competing page.
Important considerations
- The nofollow flag comes from the enabled backlink provider’s crawl; providers use different indexes and scales, so their metrics are comparative indicators, not Google scores.
- Modern search engines may treat
nofollowas a hint rather than a strict directive, so a nofollow link is not guaranteed to be ignored entirely. - Nofollow status is one attribute among many — correlation with rankings is not causation, and no single link attribute makes a page rank.
- Only compare followed-versus-nofollow shares across pages measured in the same run and provider, or the numbers are not like-for-like.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.