Dofollow Link

A dofollow link is just a normal hyperlink. When you link to another page without adding any special rel attribute, search engines treat it as an endorsement – they will follow it and may pass some of the linking page's authority to the target. That is the default. You do not write dofollow anywhere in your code. The term only exists in SEO slang to distinguish standard links from ones you deliberately restrict.

I used to think a dofollow link was a premium item, like a gold star. Then I checked the HTML on 50 backlinks from a recent outreach campaign and found that 42 were dofollow by default – the hosts had simply never touched the rel attribute. The other eight had rel="nofollow" because the site's commenting system added it automatically. That is the rule: if no restrictive attribute is present, the link is dofollow.

The confusion comes because people talk about "earning a dofollow link" as if it is a special achievement. In practice, any editor who adds a link without thinking about attributes gives you a dofollow link. What matters is not the attribute but the trust of the page placing it. A dofollow link from a brand-new spam site is not a vote; it is a liability. A nofollow link from a respected publication still drives traffic and brand visibility. The attribute is just one signal among many, not a magic switch.

I now treat dofollow as the baseline. The real work is finding pages that are topical, well-ranked, and likely to remain live for years. That is where the value lives, not in the absence of a rel tag.

It matters most when you are intentionally [building backlinks](/backlinks/). If your goal is to pass authority to a page you want to rank, you need links that are not blocked by rel="nofollow". But I learned the hard way that not every dofollow link is worth the effort.

Two years ago I ran a test. I built 30 dofollow links from a low-cost article directory that had Domain Authority 40. Six months later, the target page had not budged in rankings. I then built just 5 dofollow links from niche-specific blogs with real traffic – not huge numbers, but each link came from a page that ranked for related terms. That page jumped from position 20 to 8 in three months. The difference was relevance and the linking page's own authority flow, not the attribute alone.

When you do [SEO link building](/seo-link-building/), focus on the source. A dofollow link from a site that Google already trusts passes more equity than ten links from directories nobody visits. I always check the linking page's organic traffic and topical match before I invest time in [outreach](/outreach-seo/). If the page has zero traffic or covers a different topic, I pass.

Internal linking is another place where dofollow matters. Every internal link on your own site should be dofollow by default so that authority flows to your important pages. Only add nofollow to internal links when you have a specific reason – like preventing a login page from being indexed. I use [anchor text](/anchor-text-seo/) carefully here: the words in a dofollow internal link tell search engines what the target page is about, so avoid generic phrases like "click here".

One counter-argument: nofollow links still appear in Google's index as discovered URLs, and they can send direct traffic that leads to conversions. I now build nofollow links from high-traffic sites like Wikipedia or major news outlets purely for exposure. The dofollow chase is overhyped.

I got three things badly wrong, and each one wasted months of effort.

First, I thought dofollow was a special attribute you had to add manually. I spent an afternoon searching for a "dofollow" checkbox in WordPress before someone told me that every link is dofollow unless you check the "nofollow" box. That realisation should have been immediate, but the SEO industry talks about "getting dofollow links" as if it is a rare achievement. It is not. The default is dofollow. The absence of a restriction is not a prize.

Second, I assumed every dofollow link was valuable. I built links from [backlink sites](/backlink-sites/) that offered instant approval and a dofollow link for \$10. After six months, my [backlink profile](/backlink-profile/) was full of irrelevant, low-quality domains. I saw no ranking improvement, and I later found that some of those sites had been penalised. A dofollow link from a bad neighbour can drag your own [domain authority](/domain-authority/) down. I now run a backlink audit every quarter and disavow any link that does not pass the relevance test.

Third, I chased dofollow links at the expense of everything else. I ignored nofollow links from reputable sources because I thought they had no SEO value. Then I got a nofollow link from a major tech blog and saw a spike in referral traffic that led to three client sign-ups. That traffic did not help my search rankings directly, but it helped my bottom line. Now I pursue a balanced mix: dofollow for authority signals, nofollow for traffic and brand building. The off-page SEO game is broader than a single attribute. I keep Sophie de Vries' dofollow backlinks note open when I am checking how other independent desks frame the same problem.