What is a dofollow link?
A dofollow link is the default state of a link. When you write an anchor tag with an href and nothing else, search engines crawl through it and treat it as a vote: some of the authority of the linking page flows to the linked one. The word dofollow is not an HTML attribute; there is nothing to add. It is the industry's shorthand for a link that has not been given rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc".
The distinction only exists because of nofollow, which Google introduced in 2005 to let sites mark links they did not vouch for: blog comments, paid placements. Everything that was not marked became, in the trade's vocabulary, dofollow.
Why it matters
Why a dofollow link matters
Links are still among the strongest signals of whether a page deserves to rank, and dofollow links are the ones that carry that signal cleanly. An editorial link from a respected publication, with no rel attribute, is the thing every link-building effort is really chasing. It tells Google that an independent party chose to send its readers to you.
The flip side is why the term gets abused. Because dofollow links move rankings, there is a market for them, and buying them is a link scheme that Google's spam policies name explicitly. A site whose dofollow links were all purchased is a site waiting for a manual action.
In practice
How a dofollow link works in practice
- 01
You earn dofollow links by being worth linking to: original work, data, a point of view, a film people want to show each other. Press coverage, partner pages, industry roundups and genuine resource lists are where they come from. You check a link by inspecting the anchor tag: no rel attribute, or a rel that does not include nofollow, sponsored or ugc, means it follows. Internal links on your own site are dofollow by default and are the links you control entirely, so build them with intent.
- 02
On the publishing side, mark what should not vouch. Paid placements take rel="sponsored"; comments and forum posts take rel="ugc"; anything else you do not want to endorse takes rel="nofollow". Since 2019 Google has treated these as hints rather than absolute instructions, which means a nofollowed link is not necessarily worthless, but a dofollow link is still the clearest signal you can give or receive.
Watch out
What people get wrong about dofollow links
Thinking dofollow is something you switch on. Plenty of agencies have been asked to make a link dofollow, as if there were a setting; there is only the absence of a rel value. The bigger error is treating dofollow as the only kind that counts. A nofollowed link from a page people actually read sends traffic and recognition, and Google can choose to count it anyway. Chasing the attribute rather than the audience is how teams end up on link-selling sites with dofollow in the product description, which is exactly where you do not want to be.
