Dofollow and Nofollow Links: Meaning, History, and Correct Use in SEO

Links are the backbone of the web. Every link from one page to another acts as a kind of vote in the eyes of a search engine: "this page considers this content worth recommending." But not all votes are equal. Thanks to the rel="nofollow" attribute and its variants, site owners can signal to search engines which links should count as a vote and which should not.

This article looks at what dofollow and nofollow links are, their short history, the changes Google introduced in 2019, newer variations such as rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored", and how they should be used in day-to-day SEO work, drawing on official statements and expert assessments throughout.

Here is a surprising fact to start with: there is no such thing as a rel="dofollow" attribute in HTML. A standard link is followed by default already. The SEO community began using the term "dofollow" informally for ordinary links that do not carry a nofollow attribute, and the term stuck as a way of talking about the concept. Google's own documentation summarizes the mechanics plainly: adding rel="nofollow" to a link tells Google that you don't want it to crawl that link or take the target page into account in search results, and if a link doesn't carry that attribute, it is followed normally. In other words, most links on the web are dofollow by default and need no extra markup at all — what actually matters is deciding which links should be restricted with nofollow.

rel="nofollow" was introduced by Google in January 2005, and the core motivation behind it was fighting the link spam that was flooding blog comments, forum posts, and wiki pages at the time. As Wikipedia's summary of the topic describes it, the nofollow value was introduced by Google in January 2005 as a way to combat comment spam on blogs, and by 2007 the major blogging platforms and engines had adopted the attribute as well. The logic was simple: a blogger didn't want the cheap promotional links dropped into their comment section to become a springboard for someone else's SEO. With nofollow, a site owner could effectively tell Google not to associate them with those links. Spammers kept building automated link farms regardless, but the SEO value of those links evaporated.

On September 10, 2019, Google fundamentally changed its nofollow policy, introducing new variations and softening what nofollow actually means to its ranking systems. The official Google Search Central blog post explained the shift this way: when nofollow was first introduced, Google didn't count any link marked that way as a signal within its search algorithm at all — that has now changed, and all link attributes, meaning sponsored, ugc, and nofollow together, are treated as hints about which links should or should not be considered in Search. This looks like a small nuance but it is significant: Google no longer treats nofollow as an absolute directive. If a page's content and the context surrounding a link are strong enough, Google may still take a nofollow link into account algorithmically.

Alongside the 2019 update, Google introduced two new rel values meant to capture more precise signals. rel="sponsored" is meant for sponsored links, advertising content, and paid placements, while rel="ugc" is meant for user-generated content such as comments, forum posts, and user profiles. Google's own recommendation in the same announcement was direct: use sponsored for any paid link, including ads or sponsorships, and use ugc for links within user-generated content like comments or forum posts. Backward compatibility was preserved for older sites, so plain nofollow remains valid and nobody is obligated to update legacy software, but newer content is expected to prefer the more specific attributes going forward.

In everyday practice, the choice usually comes down to a handful of situations. A source or citation link in editorial writing, or a reference to a trusted business partner, needs no special attribute and should be left as an ordinary dofollow link. Advertising, sponsored posts, and affiliate links that generate revenue should carry the sponsored attribute. A link left by a reader in a comment section, or a link inside a forum post, wiki, or user profile page, should carry ugc. An external source you don't trust or haven't verified should carry nofollow, and links to your own site's login or admin pages should either carry nofollow or simply not be linked at all. Moz's guide to nofollow links frames the same idea from a slightly different angle: nofollow links typically don't pass authority, or link equity, but they remain a meaningful part of a healthy link profile, since a natural link profile is usually a mix of both dofollow and nofollow links rather than all of one or the other.

Several myths persist around this topic. One is the belief that making every outbound link nofollow will make Google favor a site — it won't; on a natural website the majority of editorial links should be dofollow, and overusing nofollow blurs the signals a site sends to Google while adding no value to the brands being referenced, since no authority is being shared. Another myth is that nofollow links send no traffic — false, since rel="nofollow" only affects search engine signals; browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox ignore the attribute completely, and users click through and visit the page regardless, so there is no difference at all between dofollow and nofollow from the visitor's side. A third myth is that PageRank no longer matters — the PageRank metric was made non-public years ago, but Google has confirmed that link analysis remains part of its internal algorithm, which is exactly why the modern link economy still matters. Search Engine Journal's editorial take on this sums it up well: nofollow shifted from being a directive to being a hint, but that shift did not make link-building strategy irrelevant — if anything, quality, contextual links became more valuable, because Google now evaluates every link together with the content surrounding it.

Every site that sets a link policy has to weigh the risk of spam somehow, and rather than picking one extreme or the other, a manual review process tends to offer the most sustainable middle path. Marking every single outbound link nofollow strips those links of value and weakens the wider web ecosystem; handing out dofollow with no filtering at all invites spam accumulation and the risk of algorithmic penalties; reserving dofollow for links that have passed manual review tends to be the most sustainable approach over the long run. Ahrefs' guide to link building emphasizes a closely related principle: most outbound links should simply be left in their default, dofollow, state, since marking too many links as nofollow can present an unnatural-looking link profile to search engines.

It's worth noting, briefly, how tkapi.com applies these principles to itself. Rather than being purely a piece of general SEO knowledge, this reflects the site's actual policy: tkapi.com grants dofollow links to the websites of the companies and products it lists only after a manual review process. Suspicious or low-quality submissions are rejected, which keeps spam from accumulating and keeps the listings organic.