Why dofollow matters less than it did

Lesson 48 of 50Module 9 · The future of link building6 min read

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

What nofollow was built for

rel="nofollow" was introduced in 2005 by the major search engines of the day to solve one specific problem: automated comment spam. The web had a hole in it — anyone could add a link to somebody else's page by filling in a form — and the attribute let publishers say I did not choose to publish this link, do not treat it as my endorsement.

That is the entire original purpose. It was never a quality judgment about the destination and never meant as a statement that the link was worthless.

What happened next is that its use expanded far past the design. Legal and compliance teams at large publishers applied it site-wide to every outbound link, as blanket policy. Ad-tech and CMS defaults applied it automatically. Whole newspaper groups now nofollow every external link in editorial copy without any human deciding anything about the destination. In 2019 Google introduced rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" alongside it, and — this is the part that matters — announced that all three would be treated as hints rather than directives for ranking purposes, in force from 2020.

A hint is not an instruction. It means the engine reserves the right to look at the link, understand the context, and decide for itself. That single change quietly undermined a decade of link building folklore, and a surprising number of programs are still reported as though it never happened.

Real profiles are mixed, and that is the point

A profile made entirely of followed links is not natural. It is a fingerprint. Nothing else on the web looks like that, because the sites that publish about you apply their own policies and defaults, and those policies vary.

On the profile I use as this site's evidence base — billhartzer.com, 1,301,839 links from 22,260 referring domains, none of them ever bought — 16.4% of links carry a nofollow attribute. That is what two decades of genuinely earned coverage produces: a mixed profile, because the real web is mixed. If your profile is 99% followed, someone chose every one of those links, and choosing every link is precisely the pattern Module 8 teaches you to spot in other people's profiles.

The same dataset argues against fetishizing the attribute in another way. 69.3% of those 22,260 referring domains sit at Trust Flow 0. Most of them are followed links. A followed link from a Trust Flow 0 domain and a nofollow mention in a national title are not close to each other in value, and the attribute is the wrong axis to compare them on.

What a nofollow link in a real publication still does

Set the ranking question aside for a moment and list what actually happens when a well-read publication covers you with an unfollowed link.

• People read it and click. Referral traffic does not check the attribute. Neither do the resulting branded searches, direct visits, or sales conversations that start with “I saw you in—”.
• Other journalists see it. Coverage begets coverage. A desk at a rival title reads the piece and calls you for the follow-up. This is how a source list gets built, and it is worth more over five years than the link would have been.
• It associates your brand with the topic, in the terms of Lesson 9.2, in a document that is far more likely to be retrieved than a mid-tier blog post.
• It syndicates. A wire or partner-network placement can propagate to dozens of outlets. Most of those copies will be nofollow. They still put your name in front of dozens of audiences and dozens of documents.
• It is defensible. Coverage you earned from a newsroom carries no manual-action risk and does not need to be disavowed in three years.

The comparison that matters: a national placement that syndicates to many nofollow outlets is usually a better outcome than a followed link on a mid-tier blog — and I would say that without hesitation to a client who came to me disappointed about the attribute. The blog link may move one query. The national placement moves the brand.

Where the followed attribute still genuinely matters

I am not going to over-argue this. There are situations where you should still want the link followed, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the flattering-not-useful writing this site exists to avoid.

• Competitive commercial rankings. If a money page has to outrank well-linked competitors on a high-value query, followed links from relevant pages remain the most reliable lever available. Nothing in this module changes that.
• Crawl discovery for new or thin sections. Followed links are how crawlers find things. A new site with no followed inbound links has a discovery problem that no amount of association solves.
• When it is free to ask. If the publication's policy allows it and you are already in conversation with the editor, ask once, politely, at the time of publication. It costs nothing.

What you should not do: pay to have an attribute changed — that converts earned coverage into a paid link and inherits every risk in that tactic profile; pressure a newsroom that has told you its policy; or refuse a placement because the links are nofollow. I have watched a client turn down a broadcast-adjacent national feature for that reason. It was the worst link building decision I saw that year.

The attributes on your own outbound links

The same discussion runs in reverse, and it is worth two minutes because most sites get it wrong by neglect rather than intent.

Three attributes exist and they mean different things. rel="sponsored" marks a link that exists because of payment or a commercial arrangement — an advertisement, an affiliate link, a paid placement. rel="ugc" marks a link inside content your users submitted, such as comments and forum posts. rel="nofollow" is the general case, and remains the right choice when you do not want to vouch for a destination.

Use them accurately. If you take money for a placement, mark it — this is not only a search guideline question but an advertising-disclosure one in most jurisdictions, and the disclosure obligation does not disappear because the link is tagged. If you moderate every comment carefully, ugc is still the honest label for what the link is.

What I would not do is blanket-nofollow every outbound link in your editorial content. Publishers who do this are throwing away the one mechanism they have for saying this source is good, and citing sources properly is part of writing something worth citing. Link out to what you actually recommend, and follow those links.

The reflex to break

Here is the habit this lesson is actually about. Coverage lands. Somebody on the team opens the page, checks the attribute, and files the result in one of two boxes: link or nothing.

That reflex made sense when the attribute was a directive and the only value of coverage was the PageRank it passed. It makes much less sense when the attribute is a hint, when the retrieval systems increasingly mediating discovery care about being named more than being linked, and when the same placement is simultaneously reach, association, credibility and referral traffic.

Replace it with a different first question: who reads this, and what does it say about us? Then record the attribute as one field among several, not as the pass/fail gate. Lesson 9.7 covers what that looks like in a report you hand to a client or a CFO, and Module 6 covers how to negotiate the placement in the first place.