Dofollow vs Nofollow Links: What the Attribute Does (and What Google Changed in 2020)

A dofollow link is a link with nothing on it. There is no rel="dofollow" in any HTML specification, and no search engine looks for one. The word is SEO shorthand for a link that does not carry nofollow, sponsored or ugc, which means the page that made it has not asked search engines to discount it. A nofollow link carries the attribute. That is the whole technical difference, and most of what is written about it is about what search engines do with the attribute rather than what it is.

This guide covers what the values mean, what Google has said it does with them, how to tell them apart on a page you do not control, and why the distinction matters less for an expired domain than the count would suggest. How backlinks work covers what a link does for the site receiving it.

What does rel="nofollow" mean?

In the HTML standard it is a statement about endorsement. The WHATWG specification says the nofollow keyword "indicates that the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page", and its link-type table gives the short form: "Indicates that the current document's original author or publisher does not endorse the referenced document." The keyword is allowed on a, area and form elements. Nothing in the specification mentions search engines or ranking.

Google gives the same value a job. Its page on qualifying outbound links lists three values. sponsored is for "links that are advertisements or paid placements". ugc is for "user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts". And nofollow is for the remainder: "Use the nofollow value when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site." Several values can be combined, so rel="ugc nofollow" is valid.

The attribute is set by the linking page, not the linked one. Wikipedia marks every outbound link nofollow. Reddit marks most. Many news sites mark links in sponsored content. A site that receives a nofollow link had no say in it.

Does a nofollow link pass any value?

Since 2020, Google says it might. The September 2019 announcement that introduced sponsored and ugc also changed what nofollow does. Before it, nofollow was a directive and Google did not count the link. After it, "All the link attributes, sponsored, ugc, and nofollow, now work today as hints for us to incorporate for ranking purposes. For crawling and indexing purposes, nofollow will become a hint as of March 1, 2020."

A hint means Google decides. The post explains why it did not keep ignoring such links: "Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at." Google has never published what share of nofollow links it counts, or which, and nobody outside Google can measure it. The useful reading is that a nofollow link is not zero and is not a dofollow link either, and any tool that reports a nofollow link's "value" is guessing.

For sponsored and ugc the position is the same, with one difference in the other direction. Google's spam policies treat buying or selling links that pass ranking signal as a link scheme, and marking a paid link sponsored or nofollow is what keeps it inside the rules. A paid link without either is the problem, not the attribute.

How do you tell if a link is dofollow or nofollow?

Look at the anchor tag. Open the linking page, view the source or inspect the link, and read the rel attribute. No rel, or a rel with only values such as noopener or noreferrer, is a dofollow link. nofollow, sponsored or ugc anywhere in the value is not.

Two things a page-level check misses. A robots meta tag with nofollow applies to every link on the page, and Google's robots meta documentation lists it alongside noindex. And a link inserted by JavaScript after load may carry a different rel from what the raw HTML shows, so inspect the rendered page rather than the source when the two disagree.

Across many links, a link index does this for you. Our backlink checker reads the Common Crawl web graph, a public crawl of the web, and lists the referring domains and pages. Common Crawl's web graphs page notes that "all types of links are listed", so the graph counts a nofollow link as a link. Read the named sources rather than the total: a link from Wikipedia or Reddit is nofollow by policy, a link from a university department or a newspaper article is usually not. Check backlinks free covers the other free methods, including Google Search Console for a site you own.

Which matters more for a backlink, the attribute or the site?

The site, in nearly every case that matters.

The first three rows are links someone had to earn. The last three are links anyone can create. A dofollow link in the fifth row is worth less than a nofollow link in the first, and edu and gov backlinks and Wikipedia backlinks go through what the earned kinds are worth in detail. A backlink profile made entirely of the bottom three rows is the profile Google's disavow documentation was written for, and it is not one you can fix by adding more of the same.

There is also a sorting effect. Sites that mark every outbound link nofollow tend to be the sites that are hardest to get a link from, because they have editors and rules. Sites that leave every link dofollow tend to be the ones that let anyone post. So "dofollow only" as a filter removes the best sources and keeps the worst.

How does this apply to an expired domain?

An expired domain's links were placed by other sites while the domain was live. Some are nofollow, most are not, and the mix says something about where the links came from. Half the referring domains being Wikipedia, Reddit and Medium means the site was cited and discussed. Half being directories with dofollow links means it was listed.

In the Revised directory every listing shows its referring domain band and the named linking sources, and the Wikipedia source hub, the Reddit source hub and the .edu source hub group listings by source. The first two are nofollow by policy, the third mostly is not, and the hubs exist because the source tells you more than the attribute. Evaluating an expired domain's link history covers reading the mix, and the expired domain checker shows the archive history next to it, before you register anything.

FAQ

What is a dofollow link? A link without rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc". There is no dofollow attribute in HTML. The term means the linking page has not asked search engines to discount the link.

Do nofollow links help SEO? Google has treated nofollow as a hint rather than a directive since March 2020, so a nofollow link can count and may not. It has not said which. Nofollow links still send visitors and still show up in link indexes, and a nofollow link from a site that vets its sources is evidence about the page it points to.

How do I check if a backlink is dofollow? Inspect the anchor tag on the linking page and read its rel attribute. Check the page's robots meta tag as well, since a page-level nofollow applies to every link on it.

Are Wikipedia and Reddit links dofollow? No. Wikipedia has marked all external links nofollow since January 2007. Reddit marks most outbound links nofollow. Both are still worth having for the traffic and the citation.

Should I only build dofollow links? No. Filtering for dofollow removes most editorially controlled sites and keeps most of the ones anyone can post to. Judge a link by who made it and why, then note the attribute.

If you want to see the attribute question in practice, browse the directory of expired domains with backlinks and compare listings by their named sources. The ones cited by an encyclopedia and a university carry mostly nofollow links from the first and mostly plain links from the second, and the source is what separates them from a listing with the same count from directories.