The main difference between the "nofollow" and "sponsored" link attributes lies in their purpose. While the "sponsored" attribute is used to distinguish links that are paid for and placed intentionally, the "nofollow" attribute serves to prevent search engines from following and attributing any ranking value to those links. Essentially, the "sponsored" attribute is used to disclose advertising relationships, whereas the "nofollow" attribute is used to indicate that the link shouldn't affect search engine rankings. So, if you have a lot of sponsored content on your website without the "sponsored" link attribute, you can still temporarily use the "nofollow" attribute to indicate that those links were paid for.