Nofollow and Noindex
Two questions reach Asha on the same day. A plant influencer she has paid wants to know how to link to Leafline "the right way". And her developer asks why the checkout page shows up in search results. The answers use two similar-sounding words that do very different jobs.
The rule
Nofollow is about a link; noindex is about a page.
Link attributes go on an <a> tag and describe your relationship to the page you are linking to:
<a href="https://leafline.example" rel="sponsored">Leafline</a>
<a href="https://example.org/fern-tips" rel="ugc">fern tips</a>
<a href="https://example.com/offer" rel="nofollow">an offer I don't vouch for</a>rel="sponsored": the link was paid for: an ad, an affiliate link or a sponsorship.rel="ugc": user-generated content, such as links in comments or forum posts.rel="nofollow": a general "this is not my endorsement" for any other case.
Search engines treat these as hints. They may still discover the linked page, but the link should not pass ranking credit as a recommendation. Labelling paid links this way is exactly what keeps them within the rules.
Noindex is set on the page itself, either in its <head>:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">or as an HTTP response header, X-Robots-Tag: noindex, which also works for files such as PDFs. It tells engines: you may visit this page, but leave it out of results. It suits checkout and cart pages, internal search results, thank-you pages and thin archive pages.
The classic trap is blocking a page in robots.txt and adding noindex. A blocked crawler never fetches the page, so it never sees the noindex, and the bare URL can still show up in results if other pages link to it. To keep a page out of results, let it be crawled and serve noindex.
The shortcut
Ask one question: "Am I describing a link, or a page?" A link that is paid, user-written or unvouched gets a rel value. A page that should stay out of results gets noindex.
The influencer's link
A link, and a paid one: the influencer adds
rel="sponsored".
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
Which attribute should a paid influencer's link to Leafline carry?
Leafline wants its internal search results pages kept out of search engines' results. What should it use?
A page is blocked in robots.txt and also has a noindex tag. What goes wrong?
Which statement is true?
Remember
- Nofollow is about a link; noindex is about a page.
- Paid →
sponsored, reader-written →ugc, unvouched →nofollow; keep a page out of results →noindex. - The trap: blocking a noindexed page in robots.txt, so the noindex is never read.