A dofollow link passes ranking authority to the page it points to. A nofollow link tells search engines not to count it. That one distinction determines how much search engine optimization (SEO) value any given link carries, whether you’re earning backlinks or deciding how to link out from your own site.
Every link you encounter online carries one of these two signals. Get the mix right on your own site and in your backlink profile, and you build the kind of natural, credible link footprint Google trusts. Get it wrong, and you either waste link equity you’ve earned or create the patterns search engines flag as manipulation. Before you can make that call for any specific link, it helps to see exactly how dofollow and nofollow work and how they interact with the rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc” attributes Google introduced in 2019.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links to your website from reputable sites with content relevant to your business, and they can lift your position in search rankings. Simply put, a backlink functions like an endorsement of the quality of your content.
When another website links to yours, it tells Google that your site is a credible source of information in your niche. The more relevant backlinks you have, the greater your topical authority and the more trust Google has in the quality of information you’re sharing.
Speaking of quality, if you’re racking up backlinks from disreputable websites that offer questionable value to searchers, that can harm your rankings.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow Links: What’s the Difference?
The clearest way to see the difference between dofollow and nofollow backlinks is in the HTML code that marks them.
- A dofollow link is a standard link. It carries no special markup: <a href=”https://example.com”>anchor text</a>
- A nofollow link adds one attribute: <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>anchor text</a>
Two related attributes, both introduced alongside the “hints” update in 2019, can combine with nofollow or stand alone:
- <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”nofollow sponsored”>anchor text</a>
- <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”ugc”>anchor text</a>
If you run your site on WordPress, you don’t need to touch code at all, as the block editor’s link settings include checkboxes for nofollow, sponsored, and UGC. Elementor has a built-in nofollow toggle, and you can add sponsored or UGC through its custom attributes field.
The “rel” attribute defines the relationship between the linking page and the destination page. It helps to remember that “rel” is short for “relationship.” Without a specific “rel” attribute, the link relationship defaults to “follow.” There are other “rel” attributes used for backlinks that I’ll tell you about later on.
To quickly check whether a link on a page is follow or nofollow, right-click it, select “Inspect,” and look for rel=”nofollow” in the HTML. Browser extensions like NoFollow (Igorware) automate this and flag nofollow links on every page you visit. Ahrefs and Screaming Frog can also check link attributes at scale across your whole backlink profile, which the Inspect method and single-page extensions can’t do.
What Is a Dofollow Link?
Technically, there’s no such thing as a “dofollow” link, although the term is popularly used to refer to a link that doesn’t have a “nofollow” relationship attribute ascribed to it.
By default, Google follows a backlink unless something tells it not to. Some site owners will use “rel=dofollow” to indicate that Google should follow a link, which isn’t wrong, but having no rel attribute at all (as in the example above) accomplishes the same thing.
A dofollow link tells Google to count that backlink when it evaluates your content’s authority for ranking. Dofollow links pass link equity from the referring domain to yours.
The more reputable the dofollow links to your pages, the more authority Google attributes to your content. When you earn dofollow links from websites that are both reputable and share topical relevance with your business, they’ll have a favorable impact on where your page appears in SERPs, which can translate to more exposure for your primary keywords.
What Is a Nofollow Link?
The nofollow attribute severs the relationship between the page it’s on and the page it links to. Google doesn’t pass authority across nofollow links, so they carry no direct impact on search ranking.
| Dofollow | Nofollow | |
| Passes link equity | Yes | No |
| Influences rankings directly | Yes | No |
| Default behavior | Yes, unless marked otherwise | No, requires the attribute |
| Still drives referral traffic | Yes | Yes |
What About Nofollow Links and SEO?
If nofollow links don’t directly impact ranking signals, are they entirely without value for SEO? Not at all.
Nofollow links still carry real value, even without a direct ranking boost:
- Nofollow links drive traffic to your website. If you earn a nofollow link from a relevant and reputable site, the people who choose to click on that link still arrive on one of your pages, interested in the content you offer. Referral traffic can drive highly qualified leads to your website, regardless of whether they come from dofollow or nofollow backlinks.
- Nofollow links can result in residual dofollow links. If a content writer happens upon a nofollow link to your site during their research, they’re likely to pick it up and add it as a dofollow link from their content.
- Google might actually be paying attention to nofollow links. (More on this below.)
Although you might not build nofollow links into your link-building strategy, they still have value. A nofollow link is better than no link at all.
Why Does the Nofollow Link Attribute Exist?
Google introduced the nofollow link attribute in 2005 to address spam links from user-generated content. Linking to low-quality sites can impact your domain authority, so Google offered up the nofollow link as a way for site owners to protect themselves from shady link builders taking advantage of forums and comments to link back to their own sites.
Introducing the nofollow link opened the door to Google requiring site owners to identify paid or sponsored links. Now, if Google suspects a site is selling backlink opportunities without properly labeling them as nofollow, it’s likely to issue a penalty for violating its Search Essentials.
Google expanded on that idea in 2019, introducing two attributes that work alongside nofollow rather than replacing it:
- rel=”ugc” for user-generated content
- rel=”sponsored” for paid or sponsored links
You can combine either one with nofollow for extra specificity, such as rel=”nofollow sponsored” on a paid placement. Google also treats all three, nofollow, sponsored, and UGC, as hints rather than absolute directives. It weighs the signal, but it can still choose to crawl and index a nofollow link if its systems judge that useful. Google explained its reasoning like this:
“Why not completely ignore such links, as had been the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.” -Google Search Central
Acquiring Dofollow Links: Pros and Cons
Building a strategy to earn high-quality dofollow links legitimately is a standard part of optimizing your website for search. Extending the effort to place topically relevant links on well-respected websites can help your content climb in SERPs.
So, what are the pros and cons of investing in a backlinking strategy to acquire dofollow links?
Pros
- Growing your backlink portfolio with high-quality links can boost your SEO ranking.
- More links (regardless of rel attribute) will attract more traffic to your website.
- Quality dofollow links from reputable websites can improve your website’s topical authority and credibility.
Cons
- Dofollow link placement on high-volume, high-quality websites with topical authority in your space can be very competitive.
- Building dofollow backlinks is a resource-heavy endeavor. It takes time to do it right.
- Low-quality dofollow links can impact your site’s trustworthiness and result in ranking penalties, or worse, a manual penalty from Google.
Acquiring Nofollow Links: Pros and Cons
A nofollow link won’t move your ranking directly, but it still carries real advantages.
Pros
- No follow links can be easier to acquire from high-authority websites.
- Even with a nofollow attribute, these links still generate leads and increase brand awareness.
- Nofollow links can be picked up by content creators and generate dofollow links from other websites.
- Nofollow links occur naturally on the internet, so having a balance of nofollow and dofollow links makes your link portfolio appear more natural to Google. If you have zero nofollow links to your website, that might raise a red flag about your backlinking practices.
- According to Google, nofollow links are just a “hint” and might indirectly impact ranking signals, even if they don’t carry the weight of a first-party endorsement.
- Nofollow links can still build AEO value. An October 2025 Semrush study of 1,000 domains, conducted with independent SEO researcher Kevin Indig, found nofollow links correlate with AI visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity almost as strongly as dofollow links do.
Cons
- A nofollow link has no direct impact on your SEO ranking.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow for External Links: Which To Use?
So far, this has been about earning dofollow and nofollow backlinks from other websites. The same choice applies in reverse: which type to use when you link out to guide your own visitors toward external resources.
There’s no right or wrong way to include backlinks on your site. There’s a time and place to use both dofollow and nofollow links within your content.
Linking Off Your Site With Nofollow Links
A nofollow link severs Google’s association between your site and wherever you’re pointing, which comes in handy in several situations:
1. When you don’t want to endorse a site.
Remember, a link is like an endorsement. Maybe you don’t want to lend your endorsement to a particular website.
If for any reason, you link to another website that you don’t completely trust, you might use a nofollow link so that Google doesn’t associate your website with the one you’re referring to.
2. Sponsored links.
Although Google frowns on the practice of buying or selling backlinks, it does acknowledge the value of sponsored links.
If you’re placing sponsored links on your website, it’s a best practice to use either the rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute.
3. Affiliate linking.
Affiliate links are treated in much the same way as sponsored links because they’re a form of link monetization.
Google doesn’t explicitly require the nofollow tag on affiliate links, but industry best practice treats them as nofollow anyway.
Or, you might choose to use the “sponsored” link attribute.
4. User-generated content.
If a user can insert a link on your website, such as in a forum or via the comments section of a blog, these should automatically be designated as nofollow links.
This tag tells Google that a third-party user has generated the content in question.
Using UGC or nofollow links in site comments is best to deter spammers from targeting your blog for black hat SEO purposes.
5. What about internal links?
Nofollow seldom belongs on a link pointing to another page on your own site. Internal links are how Google discovers and understands the relationship between your pages, and marking them nofollow blocks signals for no real benefit.
The one narrow exception is a page you don’t want indexed, such as an internal search results page or a duplicate filtered view, where nofollow (or a noindex tag, which does more of the real work here) can help.
External Linking With Dofollow
Dofollow makes sense when you’re linking out in ways that reflect well on your site:
1. The link adds value for readers.
When you link to another website as a valuable resource for your readers, it’s good digital citizenship to “endorse” that trustworthy site with a dofollow link.
2. The website is authoritative.
If you’ve crafted an article that cites data sources to back up your points, linking out to those sources with dofollow links signals to Google that you’re offering well-researched and high-quality content. You’re leaning on the authority of your sources to lend credibility to your content.
Useful links to scientific papers and government websites should always be dofollow since you want to be associated with those trustworthy experts.
3. The link destination offers accurate information.
Use the same dofollow attribute whenever you link to a site with accurate, legitimate information. Again, it’s all about signaling to Google the caliber of the sites you associate your domain with.
Backlinking: Quality Over Quantity
Before Google introduced nofollow links in 2005, the number of backlinks to your website mattered more than their quality. That scenario led to significant abuse among disreputable SEOs. They used bots and spam engines to game the system and artificially push their content to the top of search rankings.
Google introduced the nofollow attribute, like many of its changes, to short-circuit spammy link-building activities. As a result, dofollow links from high-quality websites have become much more valuable because they’ve been earned more often than not.
Auditing Your Own Dofollow-to-Nofollow Ratio
Google has never published a target ratio, and chasing an artificial number is its own kind of manipulation. Visibility into your current mix matters because it’s how you spot a profile that’s grown lopsided or picked up links from sources you wouldn’t choose today.
Google Search Console shows you who links to your site, though it doesn’t break links out by attribute. For that level of detail, Ahrefs and Semrush both let you filter a backlink profile by dofollow and nofollow, alongside referring domain quality. Run that check periodically, the same way you’d audit for toxic backlinks, rather than treating it as a one-time task.
What a Healthy Link Profile Actually Looks Like
A natural link profile has both link types, earned from a range of sources, growing steadily rather than in spikes.
To earn high-quality backlinks in the first place, you need content people can actually find and other sites want to be associated with. At Victorious, link building starts with identifying where a customer’s competitors are already earning links, then finding industry sources that would plausibly link to the customer. Every prospective link passes through a four-level quality check covering URL quality, domain metrics, competitive relevance, and compliance before it ever gets pursued.
That process doesn’t distinguish whether the resulting link ends up dofollow or nofollow. A high-authority nofollow placement on a site that reaches your actual audience can do more for your visibility than a mediocre dofollow link nobody will ever click, and it carries the same weight for how confidently AI systems and search engines associate the client’s brand with its area of expertise.
That’s also where dofollow and nofollow links intersect with answer engine optimization (AEO), the practice of structuring content so AI-powered search tools can find, verify, and cite it. AI Overviews and other AI-driven search results tend to draw on pages with strong, verifiable authority signals, and your backlink profile, dofollow and nofollow links alike, is part of how that authority gets established. Victorious treats SEO and AEO as one integrated system rather than separate efforts, because the signals that earn traditional rankings are largely the same ones that earn AI citations. An October 2025 Semrush study of 1,000 domains, run with independent SEO researcher Kevin Indig, confirms this directly: nofollow links correlate with AI visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity nearly as strongly as dofollow links do.
To learn more about how a link-building strategy that puts dofollow and nofollow signals to work can grow your organic footprint, explore Victorious’s link building services or reach out to get a free SEO consultation.
FAQs
Are nofollow links worth anything?
They don’t pass ranking authority, but they still drive referral traffic and round out the natural, diverse link profile Google expects a real business to have. A Semrush study found nofollow links correlate with AI visibility almost as strongly as dofollow links do.
How do I add a nofollow link in HTML or WordPress?
In HTML, add rel="nofollow" to the anchor tag: <a href="url" rel="nofollow">anchor text</a>. In WordPress, you don’t need to write code. Set the rel attribute directly in the block editor’s or Elementor’s link settings when you insert the link.
What’s the difference between nofollow, sponsored, and UGC links?
Nofollow is the general signal not to pass authority. Sponsored specifically marks paid or advertising links, while UGC marks links from user-generated content like comments or forum posts. You can combine sponsored or UGC with nofollow, such as rel="nofollow sponsored", for extra specificity.
Should internal links ever be nofollow?
Rarely. Internal links help Google understand how your pages relate to each other, and nofollowing them blocks that signal. The rare exception is a page you don’t want indexed at all, which a noindex tag handles more directly than nofollow does.
