Nofollow Vs Dofollow Links For SEO | What You Must Know

Look, SEO is all about links. Period. They’re the invisible roads connecting the whole internet. For Google, links are the main way it figures out who to trust, who’s an expert, and what’s high-quality.

But here’s the catch: not all links are the same. Not even close.

They fall into two main buckets, and how Google sees your site completely changes based on which bucket a link is in. This is the whole nofollow vs dofollow links for SEO puzzle. Frankly, it’s one of the first things you have to get right.

It seems simple on the surface. It’s not.

Get this wrong, and you’re just throwing money away on “link building” that does zero. Zilch. Or even worse, you might be ignoring amazing links just because they have the “wrong” tag. This isn’t just tech-speak. This is the foundation of your SEO.

Let’s dig in.

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Key Takeaways

Before we get into the weeds, here are the absolute essentials:

• Dofollow (The Default): Just a normal link. It’s an instruction to Google: “Follow this link and give the site it points to some authority (PageRank).” This is the “vote” you’re looking for.
• Nofollow (The Instruction): This one has a special tag: rel="nofollow". It used to be a strict order: “Don’t follow this, and don’t pass any PageRank.”
• The 2019 Big Change: Google flipped the script. Nofollow isn’t a rule anymore. It’s a “hint.” This means Google might still follow it and pass some credit. They get to decide.
• New Tags (sponsored & ugc): Google also gave us rel="sponsored" for paid/affiliate links and rel="ugc" for comments or forum posts. They just want more info.
• You Need Both: A real, natural link profile (the kind Google trusts) has a mix of dofollow and nofollow links. If you only chase dofollow, you look like a spammer. It’s a huge red flag.

Why Does Google Even Care About Links in the First Place?

To really get this, we gotta go back. Way back. Back when Google was just a Stanford research project, its founders had a revolutionary idea. Instead of just scanning the content of a page, they would analyze the links pointing to it.

They called this PageRank.

The idea was brilliant, simple, and ripped straight from academia. How do you know a scientific paper is important? You count how many other papers cite it.

Google just did the same thing. Links are “citations.” They’re “votes.”

A link from Site A to Site B? That’s Site A saying, “I trust Site B. My users should check this out.” A page with thousands of high-quality votes was, therefore, more trustworthy. It deserved to rank higher.

This single idea is what made Google the king of search.

This “vote” is what we all call “link equity.” Or, less formally, “link juice.”

So, What Exactly Is a “Dofollow” Link?

Here’s the first secret most people don’t get: there’s no such thing as a “dofollow” tag.

Seriously. It doesn’t exist.

A “dofollow” link is just a normal link. It’s the default. It’s a link that’s missing the nofollow attribute. When you add a link, the HTML looks like this:

<a href="https://www.example.com">This is a standard link</a>

That’s all it is. Since there’s no special instruction, Google’s crawler follows it. It passes the “vote.” It indexes the new page. It reads the anchor text (the clickable words) to figure out what the page is about.

For years, these links have been the gold standard of SEO. They’re the main drivers of off-page authority. When you hire an SEO agency for “link building,” this is almost always what they’re trying to get.

Okay, So How Do Dofollow Links Actually Help Me Rank?

Dofollow links are the engine of your SEO. They help in three main ways.

First, they pass authority. A dofollow link from a huge, trusted site like the New York Times is a massive vote of confidence. It tells Google your site has serious authority, which can lift your entire site’s rankings.

Second, relevance. Google isn’t just looking at the link, it’s reading the anchor text (the clickable words). If a dog training blog links to your new puppy guide with the anchor text “best puppy training guide,” Google sees that. It connects the dots. “A trusted site on ‘dog training’ thinks this other page is the ‘best puppy training guide.’ It must be relevant.”

Third, discovery. Google’s bots (Googlebot) find new stuff by crawling links. A dofollow link on a big, busy site gets your new article found in hours, not weeks.

So Why Did We Need a “Nofollow” Tag in the First Place?

Simple: in the early 2000s, spammers ruined everything.

As soon as they figured out links = votes, they started blasting their links everywhere.

The easiest target by far? Blog comments. Spammers wrote bots to leave thousands of comments on every blog they could find, all linking back to their junk sites.

“Great post! Check out my site for cheap pills!”

This “comment spam” was wrecking the internet. Worse, it was polluting Google’s PageRank. Spam sites were ranking because they had thousands of these garbage “votes.”

So, in 2005, Google and other search engines introduced a fix: rel="nofollow".

It was a simple bit of HTML:

<a href="https://www.spammysite.com" rel="nofollow">This link won't pass value</a>

This tag was a direct order. It told search engines two things: “Do not follow this,” and “Do not pass any PageRank.”

It was a digital dam. It stopped that flow of link juice cold. WordPress and other platforms quickly built it in, automatically adding rel="nofollow" to all comments. And just like that, the comment spam problem was mostly solved.

Didn’t Google Change the Rules on Nofollow a Few Years Ago?

They sure did. And this is the part so many people still get wrong.

For 14 years, nofollow was a simple rule: “Don’t count this.” But in September 2019, Google threw a huge curveball. Nofollow was no longer a rule.

It was now just a “hint.”

That’s a massive difference. A rule is an order. A hint is… just a suggestion.

What does this mean? It means Google now reserves the right to ignore the nofollow tag. As Google officially stated in their webmaster blog post, “When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal… This has now changed. …we will treat them as hints…”

Why the change?

Because in solving the spam problem, Google realized it was losing a ton of valuable data. Think about it: a link from Wikipedia is nofollow. Does that link really have zero value? A link from a major newspaper’s comment section? Also nofollow.

Google was throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By changing nofollow to a “hint,” Google gave itself permission to reclaim all that lost data. It can now use its AI to decide, link by link, if a nofollow link should still count.

If Nofollow is a “Hint,” Why Create sponsored and ugc?

When they made the “hint” update, Google also gave us two new, more specific tags. They did it to help us give them better hints.

1. rel="sponsored": This is the big one for anyone who makes money from their site. Google really wants you to use this for any link you were paid for. That includes paid links, sponsorships, and affiliate links. It clearly tells Google, “This link is here because money changed hands. It’s not a natural vote.”
2. rel="ugc": This stands for “User-Generated Content.” It’s what you’re supposed to use for blog comments, forum posts, and so on. It tells Google, “A user added this, not the site owner. Check it out.”

Nofollow is now the catch-all. If it’s not paid and not user-generated, but you still don’t want to vouch for it, nofollow is your tag.

Do I Really Have to Use These New Tags?

Google’s official advice is to be as specific as you can. They strongly prefer you use sponsored for paid links to “protect users from spammy and manipulative behavior.”

Honestly, using rel="sponsored" for your affiliate links isn’t really negotiable. It’s just smart risk management. It’s the clearest way to tell Google you’re playing by the rules.

For user-generated content, most modern platforms like WordPress handle this automatically. You probably don’t need to worry about it.

You can even combine them. A sponsored link in a comment?

rel="ugc sponsored"

Or:

rel="nofollow sponsored"

Google says that’s totally fine. The key is to just be as clear as you can.

My First Big “Oh Crap” Moment with Links

I’ll never forget one of my first big audits as a freelancer. A local e-commerce store came to me, totally panicked. Their rankings had completely vanished.

Overnight. Gone.

I dug into their links, and my stomach just dropped. They’d hired some cheap “SEO expert” who promised “50 DA 90 links” for $500. What they got was a blast of spammy, keyword-stuffed links from a “private blog network.” And they were all dofollow.

I had never seen a more unnatural-looking link profile.

Google hadn’t just de-indexed them. They’d hit them with a manual action for “unnatural inbound links.” My job (which I didn’t take) would have been to hunt down every one of those spammy sites and beg them to remove the link. Or, failing that, use Google’s Disavow Tool to tell Google, “Please ignore all these links we paid for.”

A total nightmare.

That was the day the whole nofollow vs dofollow thing stopped being a theory for me. It was the day I realized a bad dofollow link is infinitely worse than a good nofollow link. That client was so obsessed with getting “votes” that they burned their whole business to the ground.

So Are Nofollow Links Just… Worthless?

This is the biggest, most dangerous myth in SEO.

No. Just… no.

A nofollow link is not worthless. A high-quality nofollow link can be way more valuable than a low-quality dofollow link.

This obsession with “link juice” makes everyone forget what links were for in the first place.

They’re for people.

A link that sends you relevant, high-intent traffic that buys your stuff is a perfect 10/10 link. Who cares what the tag says?

What’s the “Hidden” Value in a Nofollow Link, Then?

Stop thinking like a bot. Start thinking like a marketer. That’s when you see the real value. A good nofollow link gives you huge benefits:

• Real Traffic: Would you say “no” to a link from the New York Times just because it’s nofollow? Of course not! That link could send thousands of customers to your site in a single day. That’s real, immediate money.
• Brand Awareness & Trust: Being mentioned on a big, respected site builds trust. This is the “E-E-A-T” (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) Google is always talking about. When people see your brand on a site they trust, your brand becomes more trustworthy, too.
• Sparking Dofollow Links: This is the one people miss. Who reads high-authority sites? Journalists. Bloggers. Other creators. Your nofollow link on Forbes might be seen by a blogger researching a story. They click it, love your content, and link to you from their own blog… with a dofollow link. The nofollow link was the bait.
• Looking Natural: What does a “natural” link profile look like? It’s messy. It has links from big sites and small sites. It has “click here” links. And it has a healthy mix of dofollow and nofollow. A profile that’s 100% dofollow looks fake. It screams “spam.” You need nofollow links to look real.

How Can I Tell if a Link on a Page is Dofollow or Nofollow?

This is a skill you need. Good news: it’s easy.

The “manual” way: just look at the code. In Chrome, right-click a link and hit “Inspect.” The HTML for that link will pop up. If you see rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc", it’s not dofollow. If you see none of those, it’s a default dofollow link.

The “easy” way: use a browser extension. Free SEO toolbars like SEOquake or MozBar will, with one click, highlight all the links on a page and color-code them for you.

How Do I Check My Own Site’s Link Profile?

You can’t just “inspect” all the links pointing at your site from all over the web. That’s impossible. You need a real SEO tool for this, like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz.

These tools crawl the web just like Google. You plug in your domain, and they’ll show you a report of every site linking to you.

More importantly, they’ll show you the dofollow/nofollow ratio.

I had this one client who was obsessed with his dofollow ratio. It was 95% dofollow. He was so proud. I told him it was terrifying. It looked 100% fake. We actually had to spend two months getting “natural” links from forums and blog comments—all nofollow—just to make his profile look legitimate.

A natural-looking site usually has somewhere in the 60-90% dofollow range. But it’s different for every industry. There’s no “perfect” number. Just don’t be at the extremes.

Should I Only Chase Dofollow Links?

No. That’s the wrong way to think about it.

Your link strategy should chase value, not a tag.

When my team and I look at a link opportunity, “dofollow” is a checkbox, but it’s not the first one.

The first question I always ask is, “Is this site even relevant to our audience?” A link from a random, unrelated site is just confusing to Google.

My second question: “Does this site have real, human traffic?” I would take a nofollow link from a site with 100,000 monthly visitors over a dofollow from a site with 10 visitors. Any day. Traffic is king.

My third question: “Is this site legit?” Is it a real brand, or a spammy link farm?

Only after I get three “yeses” do I ask, “Is the link dofollow?” If it is, great. That’s a bonus. We get the traffic, the brand authority, and the PageRank. But if it’s nofollow, it’s still a huge win.

When Should I Use These Tags on My Own Site’s Links?

This is just as important as the links you get. How you link out tells Google a ton about you. Using these tags right protects your site.

Here’s the simple version:

• Use rel="sponsored" (or rel="nofollow sponsored") for:
  • Any and all affiliate links. No exceptions. (Like Amazon links).
  • Any link in a sponsored post a brand paid you for.
  • Any link you sold in your footer or sidebar (which is a bad idea anyway).
  • Any banner ad that links out.
• Use rel="ugc" for:
  • All links in your blog comments. (WordPress does this for you).
  • Any links posted by users on a forum you run.
  • Links in user reviews or guestbooks.
• Use rel="nofollow" for:
  • This is your “I don’t trust this” tag.
  • When you link to a site as a negative example (“Don’t buy from this spammy site…”).
  • When you link to a site you’re not 100% sure about, but you have to for context.
  • Any time you link out and just feel a little… weird about it. It’s a simple way to tell Google, “This is for reference, I’m not voting for it.”

What About Links Inside My Own Site? Should I Nofollow Those?

No. Almost never. Just… please don’t do this.

Your internal links are the glue holding your own site together. They’re critical. They help Google understand your site’s structure and spread PageRank from your homepage to your important blog posts or product pages.

You want Google to follow these. You want that PageRank to flow.

An old, “black hat” trick was called “PageRank Sculpting.” The idea was to nofollow all your “unimportant” links (like “Contact Us” or “Privacy Policy”) to try and “hoard” all the PageRank for your money pages.

Google has said over and over this is a bad idea. It does not work. It just confuses the crawler and makes PageRank disappear.

The only tiny exception might be a “Login” link on a massive e-commerce site, but even then, it’s totally unnecessary. Just let Google crawl your site.

So, What’s the Final Verdict?

Here’s the truth: there is no battle.

Thinking of “nofollow vs dofollow links for SEO” as a fight is the wrong way to see it.

They’re two different tools for two different jobs. Both are critical for a healthy, long-term strategy.

Think of it this way:

Dofollow links are your Authority Builders. They are the raw power. They are the “votes” that directly build your site’s PageRank and push you up the rankings.

Nofollow (and ugc/sponsored) links are your Influence Builders. Their value isn’t a direct “vote.” Their value is in traffic, brand awareness, user trust, and building a natural-looking profile that Google’s spam filters will respect.

Your job is to stop obsessing over the HTML tag and start obsessing over quality.

Just ask one question: “Will a link from this site send me people who actually care about what I do?”

If the answer is yes, go get that link.

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