Definition
A link attribute asking search engines not to pass authority. Paid placements are supposed to carry it, or the sponsored attribute.
Introduced in 2005 against comment spam, rel="nofollow" has since been joined by two more precise values: rel="sponsored" for paid or compensated links, and rel="ugc" for anything readers posted themselves. Since 2019 Google treats all three as hints rather than instructions, which means it decides case by case whether to follow and count them.
How it works
The attribute sits in the link’s markup, invisible to readers:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="sponsored">our partner</a>
A publisher adds it to say they are not vouching for the destination. Where money changed hands, that is not a courtesy but a disclosure requirement — Google’s guidelines treat an undisclosed paid link as a scheme, and the penalty falls on both ends of it.
Because the attribute is now a hint, a nofollowed link is not guaranteed to be worthless, and a followed one is not guaranteed to count. That ambiguity is deliberate, and it rewards the same thing everywhere else does: links a publisher would have given anyway.
Why it matters in iGaming
Almost every commercial placement in this sector is paid in some form, which makes the attribute a constant negotiation. Publishers who understand it ask for it; publishers who do not are the ones whose sites eventually get filtered, taking the links with them.
There is a second reason to care, and it has nothing to do with rankings. Advertising rules in several regulated markets require paid gambling coverage to be marked as such. A missing disclosure is a regulatory question before it is a search question, and the search engines are the more forgiving of the two.
Example
An affiliate pays for a review in an online magazine. The link carries rel="sponsored" and the article is labelled as advertising. It passes no authority and it was still worth buying: the magazine’s readers are exactly the audience, and the brand mention feeds the answer engines, which do not care about link attributes at all.
Common mistakes
- Treating a nofollowed link as worthless. Referral traffic, brand familiarity and the mention itself all survive the attribute; only one of the several reasons for a placement is affected.
- Paying for a followed link and calling it editorial. The pattern of paid placements is visible across a vertical, and the argument that any single one was earned rarely survives contact with a manual reviewer.
- Adding nofollow to internal links to shape crawling. It has not worked that way for over a decade; use the site’s structure instead.