Do-follow, no-follow, sponsored: what the link tags mean

17 October 2026 · 4 min read

When a guest post goes live, the link inside it can carry a tag in its HTML. That tag is the rel attribute. It tells search engines how the site wants the link to be treated. There are three you will meet.

The three tags

• No tag (often called "do-follow"). A normal link. Search engines may count it as a recommendation of the page it points to.
• rel="nofollow". The site is saying "we are linking, but we do not vouch for this page". It was the original way to mark links the site did not want to endorse.
• rel="sponsored". Introduced by Google in 2019 for links that are paid or part of an advertising arrangement. rel="ugc" was introduced at the same time for links in user-generated content such as comments and forum posts.

Since March 2020 Google treats all of these as hints rather than strict commands. It may still decide for itself how much weight a link gets.

What Google says about paid links

Google's published spam policies list buying or selling links that pass ranking credit as link spam. Its guidance for paid or sponsored placements is to mark them with rel="sponsored" (or nofollow). The same policies also name large-scale guest posting campaigns that use keyword-rich anchor text as an example of link spam.

We are not telling you what to do with that. We are telling you it exists, because it is the rule the whole guest post market sits under. Many sites that accept guest posts leave the link untagged, and many do not. The trade-off is yours to weigh.

What to ask a site before you pay

1. Which tag will my link carry? Ask for a plain answer, not "it depends". If you care about the tag, get it in writing before the post is written.
2. Is the post marked as sponsored or labelled as a contributed article? Some sites add a disclosure line. That is normal and not a problem.
3. Will the link stay? Ask how long the post stays up and whether the site removes old contributed posts.
4. How many links are allowed? Our survey of site owners shows the usual answer is one or two.

How to check after it goes live

Open the page, right-click the link and choose "Inspect". Look at the a tag. If you see rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc", that is the tag. If there is no rel attribute, the link is untagged. Check the page again after a few weeks, because sites sometimes edit old posts.

A fair way to think about it

A link is still a link to readers whatever its tag, and a post on a relevant site can send visitors even when the tag asks search engines not to count it. If rankings are your only goal, understand the guidance above first and decide how much risk you are comfortable with. Revntra does not promise rankings or traffic from any placement.

More from the blog

• Anchor text for guest posts: how to choose it without over-doing it
• What to put in a guest post brief
• How to read a traffic number: Ahrefs, SEMrush and the rest