Dofollow Link

What is a dofollow link?

A dofollow link is a normal hyperlink that passes ranking signals to the page it points at. When another site links to you this way, some portion of that site's authority flows to your page, which is the mechanism behind most of what people call link building.

Here is the part that most articles get wrong: there is no such thing as a dofollow attribute. You cannot add rel="dofollow" to a link and make it count for more. Search engines ignore it entirely. "Dofollow" is simply the community's name for a link that has not been marked with rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc". The default state of every link on the web is dofollow.

So a plain link like this one is dofollow:

<a href="https://example.com">Example</a>

And this one is not:

<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>

How to check whether a link is dofollow

Open the page that links to you, right click the link, and choose Inspect. Look at the rel attribute on the anchor tag. If there is no rel attribute, or the rel does not contain nofollow, sponsored, or ugc, the link is dofollow.

Do this on the live page rather than trusting what a directory or a seller told you. A meaningful share of sites that advertise dofollow links do not actually deliver them, sometimes by policy change and sometimes because a plugin adds the attribute automatically. We wrote about how to verify this properly in dofollow backlinks that show up in Ahrefs.

Why dofollow links matter for startups

Early on, your problem is almost never content and almost always authority. A new domain has no backlink profile, so it cannot compete for anything commercial regardless of how good the writing is. Dofollow links are the mechanism that changes that, which is why launches, directories, integrations, and genuine editorial coverage matter so much in the first year.

They are also the reason directory submission is worth doing at all. A listing that passes no authority is a traffic play, not an SEO play, and those are different things worth different amounts.

Dofollow links in practice

You submit to twelve directories over a week. Three months later you check which links actually exist and how they are marked. Seven are dofollow and indexed. Two are dofollow but on pages that are noindexed, so no crawler will ever count them. Two are nofollow. One never published your listing at all.

That is a realistic outcome, and it is why verification matters more than volume. Seven useful links from twelve submissions is a decent afternoon. Assuming twelve useful links, and building your plan on that assumption, is how founders end up confused about why nothing moved.

Rules of thumb

Relevance still comes first. A dofollow link from an unrelated, low quality site is worth less than a nofollow link from a publication your buyers actually read, because the second one brings people. Judge a link opportunity on traffic and relevance first, then check the rel attribute.

Never pay for dofollow links. Paid links that pass ranking signals violate Google's spam policies, and the sites selling them at scale are exactly the footprint those systems are built to find. If you buy a placement for traffic or brand reasons, it should be marked rel="sponsored", and that is fine.

Common mistakes

• Adding rel="dofollow" to your own links. It does nothing. The attribute is not real and search engines ignore it.
• Trusting the seller. Check the rendered HTML on the live page. Claims and reality diverge often.
• Forgetting the page must be indexable. A dofollow link on a noindexed or blocked page passes nothing, because the page is never counted.
• Checking only in the browser. If the link is injected by JavaScript after load, crawlers may never see it. View the server rendered source, not just the inspector.
• Chasing dofollow to the exclusion of everything else. Links that send real visitors are valuable even when they pass nothing.

Related concepts

The counterpart is the nofollow link, and the value that a dofollow link carries is link equity. The clickable words themselves are anchor text, which tells search engines what the destination is about. If you are evaluating where to get links from, the bulk domain rating checker ranks a whole list of candidate sites in one pass, and automated submission tools are worth reading about before you buy one.