Dofollow vs Nofollow Links: What the Difference Means for Rankings
"Dofollow" is not actually a thing in HTML. There is no rel="dofollow" attribute. A dofollow link is just a normal link with no instruction attached, and the term exists only to contrast it with links that carry rel="nofollow". That small detail tells you a lot: following links is the default, and nofollow is the exception a site owner chooses to add.
What the nofollow attribute does
A nofollow link looks like this:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">example</a>
Google introduced nofollow in 2005, mainly to fight comment spam. Bloggers were drowning in automated comments full of links, and nofollow gave them a way to say "I don't vouch for this." For many years Google treated nofollow as a strict directive: the link passed no credit and Google did not use it for crawling.
In 2019 that changed. Google announced that nofollow would be treated as a hint, and introduced two more specific attributes, rel="sponsored" for paid or affiliate links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content like comments and forum posts. As a hint, nofollow means Google may still choose to use the link for discovery or ranking, but you should not assume it does. In practice, treat nofollow links as passing little to no ranking credit. The newer attributes get their own article: sponsored and UGC link attributes.
A side-by-side comparison
| Followed (dofollow) link | Nofollow link | |
|---|---|---|
| HTML | No rel value, or rel values that don't restrict | rel="nofollow" |
| Passes ranking credit | Yes, depending on the page's quality | Usually little or none, treated as a hint |
| Sends visitors | Yes | Yes |
| Helps discovery | Yes | Possibly |
| Typical sources | Editorial articles, guest posts, resource pages | Comments, forums, social media, many news sites, paid placements |
Where you will see nofollow links
Large platforms nofollow outbound links by default because they cannot vet every link users add. Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, YouTube descriptions and most social networks fall in this group. Many big news publishers also nofollow outbound links, either everywhere or for certain sections.
That does not make those links worthless. A link from a well-read Reddit thread can send a steady trickle of real visitors to a SaaS tool for years. A mention in a national news story can lead other journalists and bloggers to find you and link with a normal followed link. Some of the best followed links I have seen came as a second-order effect of a nofollow mention.
Why you should not chase only dofollow links
When people start buying or building links, there is a strong pull toward rejecting anything nofollow. I think that is a mistake for two reasons.
First, a link profile that is 100% followed, keyword-anchored links looks nothing like a real website's profile. Real sites collect a messy mix: social shares, forum mentions, directory listings, news citations and editorial links. Some are followed, many are not. A profile with zero nofollow links is one of the easier patterns to spot.
Second, the value of a link is not only ranking credit. Traffic, brand exposure and referral partnerships all come from links regardless of the rel attribute.
What the right ratio is depends on your niche, and I would not trust anyone who quotes a precise target. Look at the top-ranking competitors in your space with a backlink tool and you will see what normal looks like for that market.
How to check whether a link is followed
The quickest manual method is to right-click the link in your browser, choose Inspect, and look at the <a> tag for a rel attribute. Browser extensions can highlight nofollow links on a page automatically. Backlink tools like Ahrefs and Semrush also label each link as followed or nofollow in their reports. If you want to check your own outbound links and their attributes, the anchor text analyzer on this site lists the links on a page along with their anchors.
When you should add nofollow to your own links
On your own site, use the attributes honestly:
- Paid, sponsored or affiliate links: use
rel="sponsored"(nofollow also works, but sponsored is more precise). - Comments, forum posts and other user content: use
rel="ugc", or nofollow. - Links you don't want to vouch for (a site you are criticising, for example): nofollow is reasonable.
- Normal editorial links to sources you trust: leave them followed. Linking out to good sources is fine and expected.
Do not nofollow your own internal links to "save" PageRank. That old trick, called PageRank sculpting, stopped working years ago, and it just makes your site harder to crawl. Internal links are covered in internal vs external links.
Where to start
Pull your backlink list from Search Console or a backlink tool and tag each referring domain as followed or nofollow. If you see almost no nofollow links at all, that is a sign your profile was built rather than earned, and your next few links should come from places like relevant communities, social profiles and local listings rather than another batch of followed placements.