Since Google’s 2019 update to how it handles these attributes, rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", and rel="ugc" are all treated as hints rather than directives. That’s the core mechanism change: before 2019, nofollow was a hard, absolute instruction that told Google to completely disregard a link for ranking purposes. After the change, Google may, at its own discretion, choose to crawl through and consider any of these hinted links for ranking purposes, including hint-based nofollow links, even though none of them guarantee full link equity passes through the way a standard followed link does.
The mechanism: hints versus directives, and why the distinction matters
Before 2019, rel="nofollow" functioned as an instruction Google’s systems followed essentially without exception: a nofollowed link would not be crawled for discovery purposes in the same way, and would not pass any ranking signal. It was a directive, not a suggestion, and behaved predictably and absolutely.
Google’s 2019 announcement changed this framing explicitly. The company introduced rel="sponsored" (for paid or advertising links) and rel="ugc" (for user-generated content links, forum posts, comments, and similar) alongside redefining rel="nofollow" itself as one of several hint attributes rather than a hard directive. Under the new framing, Google’s systems can choose to use any of these attributed links as one signal among many in deciding how to crawl and rank, rather than being categorically barred from considering them. Google has confirmed that hinted links, including nofollow-hinted ones, can be used for discovery purposes (Googlebot may still crawl through them to find new pages) and can factor into ranking systems at Google’s discretion, even though the explicit intent behind the attribute, “don’t treat this as my own editorial endorsement,” is still respected as the general default behavior.
The practical difference between the three attributes isn’t really about how strongly each is “trusted” on some sliding scale Google has disclosed; it’s about what information each communicates regarding the nature of the link, which the hint model factors in as part of its discretion. rel="sponsored" tells Google specifically that a link is paid or otherwise part of an advertising or compensated relationship. rel="ugc" tells Google the link originated from user-generated content the site owner didn’t personally vet or endorse editorially. rel="nofollow" remains the general-purpose signal for “don’t treat this link as an endorsement” without specifying which of the more specific reasons applies. All three now function as inputs Google’s systems weigh, rather than absolute exclusions.
It’s also worth being precise about what “hint” means mechanically, since it’s easy to overstate. A hint is information Google’s systems take into account alongside everything else they know about a link, the linking page’s context, the destination, patterns across the wider link graph, when deciding how to crawl and whether to factor a given link into ranking. It is not a probability dial that Google has disclosed a value for, and it is not the case that Google “usually respects nofollow but sometimes overrides it” in some quantified way. The accurate description is that the attribute changes the category of evidence Google has about the link’s nature, and that evidence is one input into decisions Google’s systems make using a much larger set of signals that Google hasn’t fully disclosed.
Crawling versus ranking: two separate discretionary decisions
It’s useful to keep the crawling decision and the ranking decision conceptually separate, since Google’s hint-based framing applies to both but doesn’t necessarily apply the same way to each. Before 2019, a nofollowed link was reliably not crawled as a discovery path in the way a normal link was. Since the 2019 change, Google has confirmed nofollow-hinted links can be crawled for discovery purposes at its discretion, meaning a page linked only through nofollow-hinted links is no longer reliably excluded from discovery the way it once effectively was. That’s a distinct question from whether, once a linked page is found and indexed, the nofollow-hinted link pointing to it factors into that page’s ranking evaluation. Google has been clear that both are discretionary now, but a site owner reasoning about “will this get crawled” and “will this pass any ranking value” are asking two different questions that happen to share the same underlying hint-based mechanism, not one question with one answer.
This distinction matters practically for a common scenario: a site using nofollow across all outbound links in user comments, hoping to prevent both discovery of and ranking credit toward whatever gets linked. The hint-based model means neither outcome is guaranteed anymore. Google may still choose to crawl a comment-section nofollow link to discover the destination page, and separately may or may not factor that link into the destination’s ranking evaluation, and a site owner has no way to force either outcome definitively through the attribute alone; the attribute communicates intent and category, it doesn’t guarantee a specific downstream treatment.
Does equity ever pass through hinted nofollow links
Google has been consistent that it doesn’t guarantee full link equity passes through a nofollow-hinted link the way it does through an unattributed, standard link. But the shift to a hint-based model does mean Google has confirmed these links aren’t automatically zeroed out either; they can be crawled and can factor into ranking evaluation as Google’s systems judge appropriate given all the context available. This is meaningfully different from claiming nofollow links now “pass PageRank normally,” which Google hasn’t said, and different from claiming they’re still fully disregarded, which was true before 2019 but isn’t the current documented behavior.
What to avoid claiming
There is no published percentage or proportion of link equity that passes through a hinted nofollow, sponsored, or UGC link; Google has never quantified this, and any specific figure circulating in SEO discourse should be treated as an unverified estimate rather than a documented fact. The honest position is that Google evaluates these links with discretion as one signal among many, without disclosing a specific weighting formula for how much value transfers in any given case.
Don’t claim the three attributes exist on a disclosed hierarchy of “strength,” with sponsored treated as more disregarded than ugc, or ugc more disregarded than plain nofollow, or any similar ranking among them. Google has explained what each attribute communicates about the nature of a link, but hasn’t published a comparative weighting between the three categories, and treating them as points on a single ordered scale of severity implies a precision Google hasn’t confirmed exists.
An edge case: multiple attributes on one link
Google’s guidance allows combining these attributes on a single link, rel="sponsored ugc" on a link within a paid guest-post-style comment, for instance, and space-separated multiple values are valid HTML and valid under Google’s documented handling. This applies when a link genuinely fits more than one category, a paid placement submitted through a user-generated comment system, for example, rather than as a way to layer on extra caution. There’s no confirmed benefit to combining nofollow with the more specific attributes redundantly, rel="nofollow sponsored" doesn’t communicate more than rel="sponsored" alone does, since sponsored already implies the non-endorsement intent that plain nofollow exists to signal; the specific attribute is more informative on its own than pairing it with the generic one.
Practical implication for choosing attributes
Use rel="sponsored" specifically for paid placements, affiliate links, and any link tied to a compensated arrangement, since this is the attribute Google explicitly designed for that category and using it correctly is part of complying with Google’s guidance on disclosed paid links. Use rel="ugc" for links embedded in content contributed by site users rather than the site’s own editorial team, comments, forum posts, reviews. Use general rel="nofollow" for any other case where a link shouldn’t be read as an editorial endorsement but doesn’t fit the more specific paid or user-generated categories. Applying the correct, specific attribute rather than defaulting everything to generic nofollow gives Google more accurate context about the nature of each link, which is more useful under the current hint-based model than treating all three as functionally interchangeable.
