nofollow

nofollow originally sculpted PageRank and kept spammy links from vouching for pages you don't trust — user-generated comments, paid placements, untrusted external sites. Since 2019 Google treats it as a hint rather than a strict directive, and added rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content to describe intent more precisely. Google also requires nofollow or sponsored on any link you were paid for; unmarked paid links are a link-scheme violation.