Quick Answer
Dofollow and nofollow are the two ways a hyperlink can tell search engines how to treat it. A dofollow link is simply a standard link with no special attribute added, and it can pass ranking value, called link equity, to the page it points to. A nofollow link carries a specific rel attribute telling search engines not to reliably pass that ranking value. Since 2019, Google treats nofollow, along with two related attributes called sponsored and ugc, as a hint rather than an absolute rule, meaning Google may still consider these links in certain circumstances even though they should never be expected to pass ranking credit reliably. Understanding this distinction, and the two newer attributes that now sit alongside nofollow, matters for anyone building, buying, or auditing backlinks in 2026.
Key Takeaways
Dofollow is not something you add to a link, it is simply the absence of a nofollow, sponsored, or ugc attribute, meaning every standard link is dofollow by default. Google moved nofollow from a strict directive to a hint starting in September 2019 for ranking purposes and March 2020 for crawling and indexing, meaning nofollow links are no longer guaranteed to be entirely ignored. Two additional attributes, sponsored and ugc, were introduced alongside this change, giving site owners a more precise way to label paid links and user generated content specifically. Nofollow links still deliver genuine value through referral traffic, brand visibility, and a healthier, more natural overall backlink profile, even without reliably passing direct ranking credit. AI search engines frequently draw on nofollow heavy platforms, including Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia, as citation sources, meaning nofollow links matter for AI visibility in ways traditional ranking discussions often overlook.
What Are Links in SEO
A link, in the context of a website, is a piece of HTML code that allows a reader to click from one page to another. Search engines rely heavily on links to discover new content, understand how pages relate to each other, and judge which pages deserve trust and visibility for a given search query.
Links fall into three broad categories. Internal links connect two pages within the same website, helping both readers and search engines navigate a site’s structure and understand which pages the site itself considers important. External links point from your site out to a different website entirely. A backlink, the specific focus of this guide, is an external link viewed from the receiving side, a link on someone else’s website pointing back to yours.
A backlink functions as a kind of vote of confidence. If a respected, relevant website links to your content, that pattern suggests to search engines that your content is genuinely credible and worth referencing, in much the same way that being cited by other researchers signals credibility in academic work. Not every link carries the same weight, however, and this is exactly where the dofollow and nofollow distinction becomes genuinely important.
What Is a Dofollow Link
A dofollow link is the default state of any standard hyperlink. When someone says a link is dofollow, they simply mean it has no rel attribute telling search engines to treat it differently, nothing has been added to restrict how the link is processed. This is worth stating plainly because it surprises many people learning SEO for the first time, dofollow is not a special tag you add, it is simply the absence of nofollow, sponsored, or ugc.
Because a dofollow link carries no restriction, search engines are free to crawl it, follow it to the destination page, and factor it into how they evaluate that destination page’s relevance and authority. This is the mechanism through which link equity, sometimes still informally called PageRank credit after Google’s original ranking algorithm, flows from one page to another.
How Dofollow Links Impact SEO
When Website A includes a dofollow link to Website B, search engines interpret this as Website A effectively recommending Website B. This recommendation can influence Website B’s rankings in several concrete ways.
Authority transfer happens when a page with its own established trust and authority links to another page, passing along a portion of that accumulated trust. This remains conceptually rooted in the original PageRank model, even though modern ranking systems weigh authority transfer alongside hundreds of additional signals rather than relying on it in isolation the way the earliest versions of Google’s algorithm did.
Faster discovery and indexing often follows as well, since a dofollow link gives search engine crawlers a genuine path to find your page, particularly valuable for newer pages that might otherwise take considerably longer to be discovered through organic crawling alone.
Ranking improvement for the linked page is the outcome most site owners care about most directly, though it is worth being clear that a single dofollow link rarely produces a dramatic ranking shift on its own, value accumulates gradually across a genuinely relevant, diversified set of quality links over time.
Read More: How to Get High Quality Backlinks for Better SEO Rankings
What Is a Nofollow Link
A nofollow link is a standard hyperlink with a specific rel attribute added, written as rel equals nofollow within the anchor tag’s HTML. In plain HTML, a nofollow link looks like this, an anchor tag pointing to a URL, with rel=”nofollow” included alongside the href attribute.
Google originally introduced the nofollow attribute in 2005, specifically to address widespread comment spam, automated tools were flooding blog comment sections with links purely to manipulate rankings, and nofollow gave site owners a way to include user submitted links without those links counting as a genuine editorial endorsement.
It is worth stating directly, since this remains a common point of confusion, nofollow does not mean a search engine will never crawl or visit the linked page. It functions as a hint that helps a search engine understand the nature of the relationship between the two sites, not an absolute instruction to ignore the destination entirely.
Dofollow Versus Nofollow, The Key Differences
Comparing these two link types directly across the factors that matter most for SEO planning.
Factor, Dofollow Links, Nofollow Links
- SEO value, Can pass ranking signals reliably, Generally does not pass ranking signals reliably
- Attribute required, None, the default state, rel equals nofollow, sponsored, or ugc
- Link equity, Can transfer meaningful authority, Limited, inconsistent authority transfer
- Crawling behavior, Search engines follow by default, Search engines may choose whether to follow, treated as a hint
- Common use case, Editorial backlinks, guest posts, digital PR, Paid links, blog comments, forum posts, sponsored content, social media
- Recommended for, Content you genuinely want to endorse, Paid, user submitted, or unverified content
This comparison should be read as a general planning guide rather than an absolute, mechanical rule, since Google’s current hint based treatment of nofollow means the boundary between these categories is somewhat less rigid than it was before 2019.
How Google Actually Treats These Links Today
This is the section most outdated articles on this topic get wrong, and it deserves particular attention given how much has genuinely changed since nofollow was first introduced.
For years, nofollow functioned as a strict directive, Google’s systems would categorically exclude these links from ranking calculations, full stop. In September 2019, Google announced a fundamental shift, nofollow, along with two newly introduced attributes discussed in the next two sections, would instead be treated as hints Google may choose to consider, not absolute rules guaranteed to exclude a link from consideration. This change applied to ranking signals starting with the September 2019 announcement, and extended to crawling and indexing behavior specifically from March 1, 2020 onward.
In practical terms, this means Google retains discretion to use even a nofollow link as a signal in certain circumstances, particularly where a broader pattern across many nofollow links pointing to a page suggests genuine relevance and popularity search engines find worth acknowledging. This does not mean nofollow links now function identically to dofollow links, the safe, realistic planning assumption remains that nofollow links will not reliably pass ranking value, even though they are no longer guaranteed to be entirely disregarded either.
Read More: Is Guest Posting Still Effective for SEO in 2026?
Understanding the Sponsored Attribute
Alongside the 2019 shift to a hint based model, Google introduced rel equals sponsored specifically for links that exist as part of an advertisement, a paid placement, or an affiliate relationship. In HTML, this looks like a standard anchor tag with rel=”sponsored” added.
Using sponsored rather than a generic nofollow on paid links gives Google a more precise signal about exactly what kind of link it is looking at, rather than lumping every non editorial link into one broad category. This distinction also carries genuine legal relevance beyond SEO, regulatory guidance in several jurisdictions, including the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, expects clear disclosure of paid and affiliate relationships, and using the sponsored attribute is considered current, appropriate practice for meeting this expectation on affiliate and paid content specifically.
Understanding the UGC Attribute
The second attribute introduced in 2019, rel equals ugc, stands for user generated content and is intended specifically for links appearing within content submitted by site visitors rather than the site’s own editorial team, blog comments, forum posts, and similar submissions. In HTML, this appears as a standard anchor tag with rel=”ugc” added.
Many modern content management systems now apply this automatically, WordPress, for example, has applied rel=”nofollow ugc” to comment links by default since version 5.3, correctly marking these links as both non endorsed and user submitted without requiring manual configuration from the site owner. Using ugc specifically, rather than a generic nofollow, helps Google distinguish genuine user contributed content from other categories of non editorial links, again supporting more precise, accurate link interpretation across the web.
Do Nofollow Links Help SEO
This is a genuinely important question many discussions of this topic answer too dismissively. Even setting aside Google’s hint based treatment, nofollow links deliver real, meaningful value through several channels independent of direct ranking credit.
Referral traffic remains entirely available through a nofollow link, since the nofollow attribute affects only how search engines process the link for ranking purposes, not whether a human reader can click it. A nofollow link on a genuinely high traffic site can send meaningful direct visitors to your website regardless of its attribute status.
Brand awareness grows every time a reader encounters your brand name and website through a nofollow link, building genuine recognition and trust independent of any SEO mechanism whatsoever.
A natural link profile benefits from nofollow presence specifically, since a backlink profile made up entirely of dofollow links can itself look unnatural to search engines, genuine organic growth accumulated through real world sharing, social media activity, and community discussion naturally includes a meaningful share of nofollow links.
Indirect link building often follows from nofollow exposure as well, a reader who discovers your content through a nofollow link, finds it genuinely valuable, and later references or links to it themselves from their own website, has just converted nofollow exposure into a fresh, potentially dofollow backlink you did not have to directly pursue.
Are Dofollow Links Always Better Than Nofollow Links
No, and this is worth stating unambiguously. Link attribute alone should never be the primary factor determining whether a specific backlink is worth having. A single, genuinely high quality nofollow link from a site like Forbes, Wikipedia, Reddit, or a respected, active industry forum frequently delivers more real world value, in trust, visibility, and referral traffic, than a low quality, barely relevant dofollow link from an obscure site with little genuine audience.
The factors that actually determine a backlink’s real value include the linking website’s genuine authority and trustworthiness, topical relevance to your specific industry, real organic traffic rather than an inflated metric alone, whether the placement sits within genuinely editorial, contextual content, and the overall trust the linking site has built within its own space. Attribute status is one input among several, not the deciding factor on its own.
Nofollow Links and AI Search Visibility
A genuinely important, still underdiscussed 2026 development concerns how AI search platforms treat nofollow links differently than traditional search ranking systems do. AI assistants and generative search tools frequently draw heavily on precisely the kinds of platforms that apply nofollow by default, Reddit, Quora, Wikipedia, and active industry forums among them, when synthesizing answers to comparison, recommendation, and research style queries.
This means a link building strategy narrowly optimized around chasing dofollow authority alone, while treating nofollow heavy community platforms as low priority, risks underinvesting in exactly the kind of presence that increasingly drives AI powered discovery and recommendation. Genuine, non promotional participation on nofollow heavy platforms, covered in more depth in this site’s dedicated guide to Reddit and AI search visibility, deserves a place in a genuinely modern backlink strategy precisely because traditional ranking value and AI citation value do not always overlap perfectly.
How to Identify Whether a Link Is Dofollow or Nofollow
Several practical methods let you check any specific link’s attribute status directly.
- Checking the HTML source code directly reveals the answer with certainty, viewing a page’s source and locating the specific anchor tag shows whether rel=”nofollow”, rel=”sponsored”, or rel=”ugc” has been added, or whether none of these attributes are present at all, indicating a standard dofollow link.
- Browser extensions built specifically for SEO work, several widely used tools among them, can automatically highlight nofollow links directly on a page as you browse, without needing to manually inspect source code for every individual link.
- Dedicated SEO platforms used for broader backlink analysis, along with Google Search Console’s own links report, typically flag link attribute status automatically within their reporting, useful when reviewing a larger backlink profile rather than checking individual links one at a time.
How to Build a Balanced Link Profile
A genuinely strong backlink strategy does not chase dofollow links exclusively while dismissing every nofollow opportunity, it builds a deliberately balanced mix reflecting how real, organic link acquisition actually happens across the web.
Focus dedicated outreach effort on earning dofollow links through methods like guest posting, digital PR, genuinely link-worthy original content and research, expert contributions to relevant publications, and resource page placements- the tactics covered in considerably more depth throughout this site’s broader link building content.
Allow and even welcome nofollow links to accumulate naturally through social platform sharing, forum and community participation, blog comments where genuinely relevant, and paid or sponsored placements handled with the correct attribute applied. These links round out a natural profile and deliver the referral traffic and visibility value covered earlier in this guide, even without reliable ranking credit attached.
Common Dofollow and Nofollow Mistakes
Buying large volumes of dofollow backlinks purely to manipulate rankings, a practice that carries genuine risk given how effectively modern spam detection systems identify unnatural, purchased link patterns.
- Ignoring genuine relevance entirely while chasing dofollow status alone, missing the reality that a highly relevant nofollow link often outperforms an irrelevant dofollow one in practical terms.
- Using paid or affiliate links without the correct sponsored attribute applied, creating both an SEO compliance issue and, depending on your jurisdiction, a genuine legal disclosure problem.
- Attempting to remove or avoid every nofollow link in an existing backlink profile, working against the natural diversity a genuinely organic profile requires rather than strengthening it.
- Focusing purely on link quantity, dofollow or otherwise, rather than genuine quality, relevance, and the overall health and diversity of the complete backlink profile.
Which Should You Actually Focus On
SEO strategy should focus on earning genuinely high quality, relevant backlinks rather than chasing dofollow status as an isolated goal in itself. Prioritize relevance to your specific industry and audience first, genuine site authority and trustworthiness second, natural, contextual placement third, real value to the linking site’s own readers fourth, and overall link diversity, encompassing both dofollow and nofollow sources, as an ongoing structural consideration throughout.
A backlink strategy built around this priority order consistently outperforms one narrowly obsessed with maximizing dofollow link count, both because search engines have grown increasingly sophisticated at recognizing genuine quality over attribute status alone, and because this broader approach captures the referral traffic, brand visibility, and increasingly AI search relevance that a dofollow only mindset leaves entirely on the table.
Conclusion
The conversation around dofollow and nofollow links has genuinely evolved since these attributes were first introduced, and treating this topic with outdated, pre 2019 assumptions leads to real strategic mistakes. Dofollow links remain valuable and worth actively pursuing through legitimate outreach and content creation, but nofollow links are not worthless, they deliver genuine referral traffic, brand visibility, natural profile diversity, and increasingly, real relevance to how AI search platforms discover and cite sources.
Instead of focusing narrowly on dofollow links alone, build a genuinely natural, diversified backlink profile filled with valuable links, of both types, that improve authority, visibility, and user trust together, since this balanced approach reflects both how search engines actually evaluate sites in 2026 and how real, organic discovery genuinely happens across the modern web.
Talk to Our Team About Building a Genuinely Balanced Backlink Profile. Explore Our Link Building Services.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are dofollow links better than nofollow links? +
Not automatically. A genuinely high-quality, relevant nofollow link can provide more real value than a low-quality or barely relevant dofollow link, so quality and relevance matter more than attribute status alone.
Do nofollow links improve rankings? +
Not reliably or directly. However, Google treats nofollow links as hints, and they can also provide genuine referral traffic, exposure, and brand visibility.
Does Google ignore nofollow links completely? +
No. Since 2019, Google has treated nofollow as a hint that it may choose to consider rather than a directive to completely ignore the link.
Are affiliate links dofollow or nofollow? +
Affiliate links should generally use the sponsored attribute to identify their commercial nature, rather than relying solely on a generic nofollow attribute.
Should every backlink be dofollow? +
No. A natural backlink profile can contain different link types. Pursuing dofollow links exclusively can create an unnatural-looking link pattern.
How many dofollow links do I need for SEO? +
There is no universal number. The right amount depends on your niche, competition, target keywords, and the referring domain profiles of comparable competitors.
Are social media links nofollow? +
Most major social platforms use nofollow or other link attributes by default. Social links can still provide valuable referral traffic, exposure, and brand visibility.
Can a nofollow link ever be changed to dofollow later? +
Yes. A site owner can manually edit the link’s HTML and remove the nofollow attribute, but this requires direct action from the website owner.
What is the difference between nofollow and noindex? +
Nofollow relates to how a specific link is treated, while noindex is a directive that prevents a page from being included in search engine indexes.
Do internal links need to worry about dofollow or nofollow status? +
Generally no. Internal links should typically remain standard links to support crawling, indexing, and the distribution of authority across your website.
