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 follow 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 |
|
---|---|
rel="sponsored" |
Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid
links) with the <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 <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 avoiding comment spam. |
rel="nofollow" |
Use the <a rel="nofollow" href="https://cheese.example.com/Appenzeller_cheese">Appenzeller</a> |
Multiple values |
You may specify multiple <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>
tags (because Google
can follow only links pointed to by an <a>
tag), except
nofollow
, which is also available as robots
meta
tag.
If you need to prevent Google from following 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.