A backlink’s rel attribute is not a simple pass-or-nothing score. Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints about links to consider or exclude in Search—not as a guarantee of zero ranking effect. The title’s claim about results from 20 platforms cannot be verified without the platform list, dated samples and captured link markup, so this guide explains what the attributes mean and how to check an individual link.
What a backlink’s rel attribute tells you
The rel attribute describes a relationship between a link and its destination. It helps a publisher label the link’s context; it is not a universal meter of how much ranking value the link transfers.
Google recommends rel="sponsored" for paid placements, including advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements. For links in user-generated content such as comments and forum posts, it recommends rel="ugc". Use rel="nofollow" when those categories do not apply and the publisher prefers not to associate with or have Google crawl the linked page. Google says nofollow is still acceptable for paid links, though sponsored is preferred. The values can be combined when more than one applies. Google’s link qualification guidance explains the distinctions.
When no rel value is needed
An ordinary link that needs no qualification does not require a rel attribute. Its absence is not, by itself, an error. Google’s documentation says: “For regular links that you expect Google to fetch and parse without any qualifications, you don’t need to add a rel attribute.”
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Do these attributes mean a backlink passes nothing?
No. Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints about which links to consider or exclude in Search. That is not a promise that every qualified link has exactly zero ranking effect, nor a guarantee that an unqualified link will improve rankings. Google announced this hint-based approach on September 10, 2019, when it introduced sponsored and ugc. Google’s announcement describes the change.
Google says qualified links will generally not be followed. That does not mean a destination can never be discovered or indexed: it may be found through a sitemap or another link. The documentation applies to qualifying anchor elements that Google can crawl; nofollow can also be used in a robots meta tag.
How to check a link’s actual rel value
- Open the page containing the link. Identify the specific profile, post, comment, advertisement or other placement you want to assess.
- Inspect the rendered link. In your browser’s developer tools, select the link element and examine its
relattribute. Look at the rendered<a>element rather than assuming a platform-wide policy. - Record the evidence. Save the page URL, observation date, link context, rendered
relvalue and destination URL. Note whether the link points directly to its destination or routes through a redirect. - Check whether the page is publicly accessible. A link on a private or otherwise inaccessible page may not be available for a crawler to see, regardless of its attribute.
For implementation details about link attribute controls, see the Yoast developer portal’s link attributes documentation.
Why a platform-wide backlink verdict needs careful sampling
A single observation does not establish how a whole platform handles links. A profile link, user post, comment and paid placement may use different markup; a redirect can also complicate what the visible link appears to point to. These are reasons to record each link’s context and rendered markup, not evidence that any particular platform uses a specific policy.
A credible comparison across platforms would need a dated platform list, a consistent sampling rule, representative public pages and captured rendered anchor markup. It should report how many links were sampled per platform and distinguish observed examples from a platform-wide default. Without those records, neither the claim that 20 platforms were checked nor the conclusion that “most” pass nothing is established.
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