What Is Dofollow?

Dofollow appears in no HTML specification and in no official Google documentation as an attribute. There's no rel value called "dofollow": type it into a link's code anyway, and browsers and Google simply ignore it, since it isn't a recognized value. The list of rel values that browsers and search engines actually act on includes nofollow, sponsored and ugc, and not once does it include the word dofollow.

The term was born by contrast. Once nofollow became a common attribute starting in 2005, the SEO industry needed a quick word for the opposite case, a link without that marking. "Dofollow" formed by analogy, not by decision of any technical body, and it stuck in the everyday vocabulary of anyone working with links. The fact that Google never adopted the term officially is itself a sign it was never part of the actual specification.

In practice, "dofollow" describes the standard behavior any crawler follows when it finds no instruction telling it otherwise: following the link normally. That's exactly why the phrase still lives mainly in the vocabulary of people who buy and sell links, rather than in Google's technical vocabulary.

A link is dofollow by absence, not by the presence of anything. If the <a> tag includes no rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc", Google treats it like any ordinary link: it crawls it, follows the destination URL, and counts it as a signal toward that page's PageRank and ranking value.

<!-- Dofollow link: no rel attribute at all -->
<a href="https://zds.es/en/what-is-nofollow/">normal internal link</a>

<!-- There is no rel="dofollow": that value has no recognized effect -->

It's worth not confusing this with the 2019 change. That change affected how Google treats links carrying nofollow, sponsored and ugc, which moved from a strict directive to a hint. The default behavior of a dofollow link didn't change at all: it works today exactly as it did before 2019, the baseline way a link functions in HTML without any added restriction. The 2019 reform touched the exception, never the rule links have followed by default since the earliest days of the web.

Put another way, while nofollow is a marking you have to add on purpose, dofollow is simply what happens when you add nothing. There's nothing to enable, configure or declare anywhere. This also explains why an excess of outbound dofollow links to low-quality sites can dilute the value a site distributes among its own pages: each dofollow link hands off a fraction of that signal, whether or not it brings any real benefit back.

In a link-building strategy grounded in technical SEO, dofollow links are the ones that actually matter: under normal circumstances, they're the only ones able to pass ranking value to the site receiving them. A nofollow link can still bring referral traffic and brand visibility, but it doesn't fill that specific role, and that distinction needs to stay clear whenever a link-building campaign gets reported to a client.

That's why, when a PR or partnership campaign lands a mention on an external outlet, the first thing checked is whether the link is dofollow or carries one of the other attributes. Affiliate marketing links, for example, are almost always sponsored rather than left as plain dofollow, precisely because they're part of a commercial arrangement.

That distinction is what separates a well-planned link-building campaign from one that mistakes link volume for links that actually count for ranking. Skipping that code check risks building an entire report on links that never counted toward the actual goal in the first place.

• Check whether a link is dofollow by inspecting the HTML code: there's no visual sign on the page distinguishing it from a nofollow link.
• Don't overpay for "guaranteed dofollow" links: it's the default behavior of any link, not a special upgrade someone is granting you.
• Prioritize dofollow links from domains with real authority and relevance, not just because they're technically dofollow.
• Keep a mixed link profile: a 100% dofollow profile tends to look unnatural to Google compared with a reasonable mix of nofollow, ugc and sponsored.
• Audit your own outbound links: if everything defaults to dofollow, you may be passing ranking value to pages that don't deserve it.
• Don't mistake a dofollow link for a quality link: the absence of nofollow says nothing about the destination site's trustworthiness or relevance.

• Believing there's a rel="dofollow" attribute you need to write into the code: it doesn't exist, and adding it has no effect recognized by Google or browsers.
• Advertising or buying "100% dofollow links" as if it were a premium feature, when it's actually the standard behavior of any unmarked link.
• Assuming every dofollow link carries the same value, without accounting for the real authority of the domain sending it.
• Overlooking that many platforms, like forums or social networks, apply nofollow or ugc automatically, even when a link looks like an ordinary dofollow link.