nofollowed

nofollowed is a term used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to describe a hyperlink that has been tagged with the "nofollow" attribute. This attribute is a directive to search engine crawlers, such as Googlebot, to not follow the link. When a link is nofollowed, search engines do not pass link equity or "link juice" from the linking page to the linked page. It also signals to search engines that the link should not be considered as a vote of confidence or endorsement.

The nofollow attribute was initially introduced by Google in 2005 to combat comment spam on blogs. By nofollowing links in user-generated content like comments, website owners could prevent spammers from creating backlinks to their sites. Over time, other search engines adopted the nofollow directive. Today, the rel="nofollow" attribute is a standard HTML attribute that can be applied to any anchor tag.

Webmasters and content creators use nofollow for various reasons beyond spam prevention. It's often used for paid links (advertisements), to avoid passing authority to untrusted or irrelevant external sites, or to guide search engine crawlers to important content on their own site by nofollowing less important links. While the primary effect of nofollow is to prevent link equity transfer, search engines may still crawl and index the linked page, but it won't be treated as an endorsement. Recent developments from Google suggest that "nofollow" is treated more as a hint rather than a strict command, with Google potentially using such links for understanding relationships between pages.