---
title: How to Qualify Outbound Links with rel Attributes for Google
description: "Google lets you specify your relationship with linked pages by adding certain values to the rel attribute in your tags. This helps Google understand which links are paid, user-generated, or that you don’t want to endorse or pass ranking signals…"
url: "https://fsidm.in/knowledge/seo/qualify-outbound-links/"
updated: "2025-09-05"
category: SEO
---

# How to Qualify Outbound Links with rel Attributes for Google

Google lets you specify your relationship with linked pages by adding certain values to the rel attribute in your <a> tags. This helps Google understand which links are paid, user-generated, or that you don’t want to endorse or pass ranking signals to.

## **Common****rel****values for outbound links:**

1. **rel="sponsored"** Use this for **advertisements, paid links, or sponsored content**.

<a rel="sponsored" href="https://example.com/paid-content">Sponsored Link</a>

*Note:* Previously, nofollow was used for this, but Google now prefers sponsored for paid links.

1. **rel="ugc"** (User Generated Content)
   Use this for **links inside user-generated content**, such as comments, forum posts, or reviews.

<a rel="ugc" href="https://example.com/user-post">User Comment Link</a>

If certain users consistently post quality content, you might consider removing ugc for their links.

1. **rel="nofollow"** Use this when you want to tell Google **not to associate your site with the linked page**, or you don’t want Google to crawl that link.

<a rel="nofollow" href="https://example.com/untrusted-link">Untrusted Link</a>

For internal links you don’t want crawled, prefer using **robots.txt disallow** instead.

## **Using multiple****rel****values**

You can combine values by separating them with spaces or commas:

<a rel="ugc nofollow" href="https://example.com/some-link">Example</a>

<a rel="ugc,nofollow" href="https://example.com/another-link">Example 2</a>

### **Important notes:**

- Links with these rel values **generally won’t be followed** by Google (i.e., won’t pass PageRank).
- However, Google may still crawl those pages via other means (like sitemaps or other external links).
- These rel attributes apply only to links Googlebot can crawl.
- To **block crawling of internal URLs**, use robots.txt rules.
- To **prevent indexing but allow crawling**, use the noindex meta tag or HTTP header on the target page.