A dofollow link is just a normal link. Nothing extra in the code, and it can pass ranking credit to the page it points at. A nofollow link has rel=”nofollow” added to it, which tells Google the site linking out doesn’t want to vouch for that page.
For rankings, followed links do the work. Google changed nofollow from a strict rule to a “hint” in 2019, which led plenty of people to announce that nofollow links count now. Google’s own announcement says something much less exciting, that in most cases it will keep treating them as before and not use them for ranking.
That doesn’t make nofollow links worthless. They bring visitors, they get you seen by people who have sites of their own, and they tend to lead to the followed links that do move rankings. They’re just not the thing that moves them directly.
The short version
- Dofollow isn’t an attribute. It’s what people call a normal link with no rel value that blocks ranking credit.
- Nofollow, sponsored and ugc all tell Google not to treat a link as an endorsement. Google treats all three as hints, and says it generally still doesn’t use them for ranking.
- Nofollow links still bring traffic, visibility and brand mentions, and none of them can hurt you.
- On your own site, mark affiliate and paid links as sponsored, user comments as ugc, and leave normal citations and internal links alone.
- WordPress adds nofollow to comment links and comment reply links automatically, and the block editor has a “Mark as nofollow” checkbox built in.
- Don’t pay for “dofollow backlinks.” A paid link that passes ranking credit is exactly what Google’s link spam policy describes.
What a dofollow link is (and why rel=”dofollow” does nothing)
Every link is followed unless something says otherwise. When a page links to you with plain HTML, like <a href=”https://yoursite.com/”>, search engines can follow it, and Google can count it as a vote for your page. That’s all “dofollow” means. The word comes from SEO slang, not from HTML.
It’s why you’ll see people search for how to add rel=”dofollow” to a link. You can’t, or rather you can type it and nothing happens, because “dofollow” isn’t one of the link types HTML defines and search engines ignore it. To make a link followed, you just don’t add nofollow, sponsored or ugc to it.
A followed link isn’t automatically a good link, though. Whether it actually helps depends on where it comes from, whether a real person chose to add it and whether it points at the page you want to rank. I went through all of that in my guide on how to get backlinks, and all of it matters more than the follow status.
Nofollow, sponsored and ugc
Google introduced nofollow in 2005 to fight comment spam. Blogs were getting buried under comments stuffed with links, and nofollow gave site owners a way to say “I didn’t choose this link, don’t count it.” It quickly became the standard way to mark paid links too.
In 2019, Google added two more values so site owners could say why a link shouldn’t count. Here’s how Google’s current guidance splits them.
| Value | What it tells Google | Use it for |
| rel=”sponsored” | This link is an ad, a paid placement or part of some other compensation deal | Affiliate links, sponsored posts, paid listings, any link someone paid for |
| rel=”ugc” | A user added this link, not the site | Blog comments, forum posts, community Q&A |
| rel=”nofollow” | I’m linking to this but don’t want to vouch for it | Anything that doesn’t fit the other two, like a link you have to include but don’t trust |
You can combine them. Google’s own example is rel=”ugc sponsored” for a paid link someone left in a comment, and rel=”nofollow ugc” works too. You also don’t have to go back and change old nofollow links to the new values. Google said there’s “absolutely no need” to, and nofollow is still an accepted way to mark paid links.
What each one does for rankings
Followed links can pass ranking credit
A followed link from a relevant site is one of the ways Google decides a page deserves to rank. Google’s ranking systems guide still lists PageRank, the link-based system it started with, among its core systems, and a followed link can pass both that credit and the meaning of its anchor text (the clickable words) to the page it points at.
“Can” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Google’s spam systems are built to switch off the effect of manipulative links, like the ones from spammy directories, link farms and sites that sell a post to anyone with a credit card. A followed link that nobody chose to add is still a followed link on paper and nothing in practice.
Nofollow is a “hint,” which mostly means it still doesn’t count
Until 2019, Google didn’t count nofollow links at all. Then it announced that nofollow, sponsored and ugc would all be treated as “hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search.” For crawling and indexing, nofollow became a hint on March 1, 2020.
Google’s reasoning was that links carry “valuable information,” such as how the words in a link describe the page it points at, and that looking at all links helps it spot unnatural linking patterns. Ignoring nofollow links completely meant throwing that information away. The hint model lets Google read them without treating them as endorsements.
What most people skip is the answer Google gave further down the same page. When asked whether the change would encourage comment spam, it said, “In most cases, the move to a hint model won’t change the nature of how we treat such links. We’ll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes.”
So a nofollow link can count. Google just says it usually doesn’t. How often “usually” is, nobody outside Google knows, and I don’t think a clean test for it exists, because you can’t isolate one nofollow link from everything else changing on a page. I wouldn’t plan around it either way. Treat nofollow links as zero for rankings, and anything you get beyond that as a bonus.
What nofollow links still do for you
Nofollow says nothing about whether a link gets clicked. A nofollow link from a popular article, a big subreddit or a well-read newsletter can send you more visitors than a hundred followed links from sites nobody reads, and those visitors don’t care about the rel attribute.
They also put you in front of the right people. Journalists, bloggers and site owners read Reddit threads, Wikipedia articles and industry forums, and some of them go on to link to you from their own sites with a normal, followed link. A lot of good followed links start as a nofollow link somebody else found.
And in 2026 there’s the AI search angle. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found that brand mentions across the web had a much stronger correlation with appearing in Google’s AI Overviews (0.664) than the number of backlinks did (0.218). It’s a correlation, not a formula, but it fits what you’d expect. Being talked about seems to count for something now, whether the link attached to the mention is followed or not.
Can nofollow links hurt you?
No. Nofollow is the attribute Google asks sites to use to keep a link out of its ranking calculations, so a nofollow link pointing at you isn’t something it will hold against you. The same goes for the nofollow links your own site gives out.
There’s also no ideal ratio of dofollow to nofollow links. You’ll see advice to keep a certain share of nofollow links so your profile looks “natural,” but Google has never published a ratio, and a natural profile is simply whatever you get when people link to you for their own reasons. Some of those links will be nofollow because of the platform they’re on. You don’t need to manufacture any to balance the numbers.
When to use each one on your own site
This is where the attributes actually matter for you, because getting them wrong on your own outbound links is the one way they can cause trouble.
Affiliate links should be marked sponsored. Google was blunt about this in a 2021 post on link tagging, where it asked sites in affiliate programs to qualify those links with rel=”sponsored” and said that when it finds sites failing to do that, it “may issue manual actions” and its systems “might also take algorithmic actions.” The same goes for sponsored posts and guest posts you were paid to publish. If money or anything of value changed hands for the link, it gets sponsored (or nofollow, which Google still accepts).
Comments and forum posts should be ugc. On WordPress, core already does this for comments.
Normal citations should stay followed. If you link to a study, a tool you recommend or someone’s article because it’s useful to your reader, that’s exactly the kind of link the web is supposed to have. Some site owners install a plugin that nofollows every external link “to keep their link juice.” It doesn’t keep anything, and I’d uninstall it. Google’s guidance reserves nofollow for links you don’t want to vouch for, and a page that refuses to vouch for any of its own sources looks less trustworthy, not more.
Internal links should stay followed too. Nofollowing internal links used to be a trick called PageRank sculpting, where you’d nofollow your privacy policy and login page so more ranking credit flowed to your important pages. It stopped working in 2009. Google’s Matt Cutts explained at the time that the credit a nofollowed link would have passed doesn’t get redistributed to the other links on the page, it just disappears. If you want to keep Google out of part of your own site, its guidance points you to robots.txt instead. If you want to push more strength to your important pages, link to them more from your other pages.
What if you use the wrong one? Google’s FAQ says there’s no wrong attribute except for paid links. Marking a normal link as sponsored or ugc at worst means Google might not count it for the other site. Leaving a paid link unmarked is the direction that gets sites in trouble.
How WordPress handles nofollow
WordPress makes a few of these decisions for you, and knowing which ones saves you from fixing things that aren’t broken.
| What WordPress does | Where | Does it matter for SEO? |
| Adds rel=”nofollow ugc” to links inside comments | Comment text | It’s correct. Leave it. |
| Adds rel=”ugc external nofollow” to the commenter’s website link | Comment author name | It’s correct. Leave it. |
| Adds rel=”nofollow” to the “Reply” link under each comment | Every post with comments | Harmless. It’s why audit tools flag “internal nofollow links.” |
| Adds rel=”noopener” to links that open in a new tab | Post content | No. It’s a security setting, not an SEO one. |
The comment ones come straight from WordPress core. Since version 5.3, links people add in comments get nofollow and ugc when the comment is saved, and the commenter’s website link gets ugc too. That’s exactly what Google asks for, so there’s nothing to change.
The reply link is the one that confuses people. Run a site audit in Ahrefs, Semrush or Screaming Frog and you’ll often get a warning about internal links with nofollow, sometimes hundreds of them. On WordPress, they’re usually the “Reply” links under comments, which core marks nofollow because they only add ?replytocom= to the URL of the post you’re already on. There’s nothing worth passing ranking credit to there. You can safely ignore that warning, or filter those URLs out of the audit.
rel=”noopener” shows up whenever you tick “Open in new tab.” WordPress adds it to stop the new tab from being able to control the page that opened it. It has nothing to do with rankings. Older versions also added “noreferrer,” which hides where the visitor came from and could wipe your site out of the other site’s referral data, but WordPress dropped that in 5.6.
For your own links, current versions of the block editor have a “Mark as nofollow” checkbox. Select the linked text, open the link settings and expand Advanced. There’s no built-in checkbox for sponsored or ugc, but several SEO plugins add a sponsored option in the same place, and you can always switch the block to Edit as HTML and type rel=”sponsored” yourself. If you use an affiliate link plugin, check its settings, because the popular ones have a site-wide option to add sponsored or nofollow to every affiliate link.
One thing not to confuse with any of this is the page-level nofollow in your SEO plugin. That’s a robots meta tag, and setting a page to “nofollow” tells Google not to follow any link on the whole page, including your internal ones. It’s easy to switch on by accident while you’re setting a page to “noindex.” Unless you know exactly why a page needs it, leave page-level nofollow off.
How to check if a link is dofollow or nofollow
For a single link, right-click it in Chrome, choose Inspect, and look at the <a> tag that gets highlighted. If there’s a rel attribute with nofollow, sponsored or ugc in it, it’s not followed. If there’s no rel attribute, or only something like noopener, it’s a normal followed link. If you check links a lot, most SEO browser extensions can highlight the nofollow ones on any page for you.
For links pointing at your site, use a backlink tool. Ahrefs’ free backlink checker shows the top links to any site, and the paid reports let you filter by followed and nofollow. Google Search Console’s Links report shows which sites link to you but doesn’t tell you which of those links are nofollow.
For your own outbound links, a crawler like Screaming Frog lists every link on your site with its rel attribute, and the free version covers up to 500 URLs. It’s the quickest way to find affiliate links that never got marked as sponsored.
Should you go after dofollow links specifically?
Go after good links, and let the follow status be a detail. I’d take a nofollow link from the one publication your customers actually read over a followed link from a site that exists to sell links, every time.
Where “dofollow” becomes a red flag is when it’s the thing being sold. Packages of “50 dofollow backlinks” and lists of “high DA dofollow sites” are selling exactly what Google’s spam policies call link spam, which includes “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” that pass ranking credit. Google says buying links is fine for advertising, as long as the links are marked nofollow or sponsored. Once someone promises you the dofollow version, you’re paying for the part Google says you shouldn’t. I covered what that costs and when people do it anyway in the should you buy backlinks section of my backlinks guide.
A couple more questions
Are social media links dofollow?
Almost never. Links you post yourself on social platforms, forums and Q&A sites (LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, X, YouTube descriptions, Medium) are nofollow or ugc, and Wikipedia’s external links are nofollow too. They’re still worth having for the traffic and the visibility. They just won’t pass ranking credit, and dropping your link everywhere mostly gets you banned from communities.
Does Google still crawl nofollow links?
It can. Since March 2020, nofollow has been a hint for crawling and indexing as well, and Google’s own guidance says pages behind nofollow links “may be found through other means” and still get crawled. So nofollow has never been a way to hide a page. If a page shouldn’t be in Google, use noindex or keep it behind a login.
Nofollow was built to label links, and Google still reads it as a label. Label your paid and user-added links honestly, leave everything else followed, and spend the energy you’d put into hunting “dofollow” on getting mentioned by sites people actually read. That’s where the followed links that move rankings come from anyway.