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Dofollow links pass authority, nofollow links tell search engines not to. But Google changed the rules in 2019, and most founder advice never caught up. Here is what actually matters now.
A dofollow backlink is just a normal link. There is no such attribute - a link is dofollow by default, and it passes authority to the page it points at. A nofollow backlink carries rel="nofollow", which tells search engines the linking site does not vouch for the destination. The part most advice misses: since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint, not a rule, so some nofollow links do count. Practical takeaway for a founder: never turn down a link because it is nofollow, and never buy dofollow links because someone promised they pass juice.
You spend an afternoon submitting your launch to thirty directories. You feel good about it. Then someone in a Slack replies: "you know most of those are nofollow, right? Total waste of time." And suddenly you have no idea whether your afternoon was work or theater.
This is one of those SEO topics where the definitions are simple, the advice is ten years out of date, and the gap between the two costs founders real time. So here is the honest version: what each type of link actually is, what changed in 2019, and which of it you should care about while you are trying to get your first hundred users.
Backlinks are votes of trust between websites. Dofollow and nofollow are how a site says whether it means the vote. A dofollow link says "I vouch for this page, pass my authority along." A nofollow link says "I am pointing at this page, but do not read it as a recommendation." That is the whole distinction. Everything below is detail on how search engines treat those two signals, and how much any of it should change what you do on a Tuesday.
Here is the first thing that trips people up: "dofollow" is not a real attribute. There is no rel="dofollow". It is a word the SEO industry invented to describe a link that has nothing special on it. Every plain link you have ever written is a dofollow link.
<a href="https://daniellaunches.com/">DanielLaunches</a>That is a dofollow backlink. No attribute, no configuration, nothing to opt into. Search engines follow it, and a share of the linking page's authority (the thing people call link juice, and Google originally called PageRank) flows to the destination. This is also why dofollow links are the ones worth earning: they are the default currency of the web, and you get them by making something other people genuinely want to point at.
A nofollow backlink is the same link with one attribute added to the <a> tag:
<a href="https://daniellaunches.com/" rel="nofollow">DanielLaunches</a>That rel="nofollow" tells search engines: this link exists, the user can click it, but do not treat it as an endorsement from us. Google introduced it in 2005 for one specific reason, and it was not to be mean to link builders. Blog comment sections were drowning in spam, because anyone could drop a link in a comment field and steal a bit of authority from a real site. Nofollow killed the incentive overnight.
That original purpose still explains most of the nofollow links you will meet. They show up wherever a site cannot personally vouch for what it is linking to: comment sections, forums, user profiles, sponsored posts, and big publishers who link out constantly and do not want to be on the hook if one of those sites gets sold to a spammer next year. It is rarely personal. It is usually a site-wide setting somebody flipped on in 2014.
For fourteen years the rule was simple: nofollow meant Google ignored the link, full stop. Then in September 2019 Google announced that nofollow became a hint rather than a directive. Google now decides for itself whether to count a nofollow link, based on relevance and context. It also became a hint for crawling and indexing in March 2020, so Google may follow a nofollow link to discover a page.
The same announcement added two more specific attributes, so sites could say why they were not vouching for a link rather than lumping everything under one word:
| Attribute | What it tells search engines |
|---|---|
| (none) | A normal link. I vouch for this. Pass authority. This is "dofollow". |
| rel="nofollow" | I am linking without endorsing. Treated as a hint, not a rule. |
| rel="sponsored" | This link is paid: an ad, an affiliate link, or a sponsorship. |
| rel="ugc" | A user wrote this, not us. Comments, forum posts, profiles. |
All three are hints. As Google puts it in their guidance on qualifying outbound links, the attributes are signals about which links to consider or exclude, not switches that force an outcome. So the honest 2026 answer to "do nofollow links pass value?" is: sometimes, Google will not tell you which ones, and you cannot control it. Which is exactly why it is a bad thing to build your strategy around.
Strip out the folklore and there are three real differences:
rel attribute said, and neither does your revenue.Roughly what to expect from the places you are actually posting after launch:
| Where | Usually gives you |
|---|---|
| Product Hunt, launch feeds | A mix. Often nofollow, still a real traffic spike. |
| Startup directories | A mix. The reputable ones are frequently dofollow. |
| Reddit, Hacker News, forums | Nofollow or ugc, and some of your best-converting traffic. |
| Blog comments | Nofollow or ugc. Do not bother for SEO. |
| Guest posts, genuine mentions | Dofollow. These are the ones that move your domain rating. |
| Paid placements, sponsorships | Should be sponsored. If a seller promises dofollow, walk away. |
Notice that the two rows with the best traffic are the nofollow ones. That is not a coincidence, and it is why "nofollow means worthless" is such an expensive thing to believe.
<a> tag for a rel attribute. If you see nofollow, sponsored, or ugc, it is not a plain dofollow link. If there is no rel at all, it is dofollow.Here is the founder-sized version of all of this. Care about dofollow versus nofollow exactly enough to make two decisions, and no more.
sponsored, and buying authority is the fastest way to earn a penalty under Google's link spam policies.Everything else is noise. A natural backlink profile is a messy mix of both, because that is what real websites produce. A profile that is 100% dofollow does not look strong to Google, it looks bought. You do not need to engineer a ratio: earn links honestly and the ratio takes care of itself.
The move that actually raises your domain rating is not auditing rel attributes. It is getting a steady trickle of links from real, relevant sites, which for a new product means a focused batch of startup directories, one genuinely useful free tool, and a few posts worth citing. Then you watch your domain rating climb over weeks, not hours.
And here is the transparent bit we would want someone to tell us: for most early products, backlinks are not the bottleneck. Getting anyone to visit at all is. Do not spend your launch month on link attributes when you have not yet found the one channel that sends people who sign up.
A dofollow backlink is an ordinary link with no special attribute, and it passes authority from the linking site to the destination. A nofollow backlink includes rel="nofollow", which tells search engines the linking site is not endorsing the destination. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a strict directive, so it may still count some nofollow links.
No. Nofollow links are not a penalty and they are not worthless. They send the same real visitors as any other link, they build brand awareness, and a natural backlink profile is expected to contain plenty of them. A profile made entirely of dofollow links looks bought, not strong.
Sometimes. Google treats nofollow as a hint, so its algorithms decide case by case whether a nofollow link contributes, based on relevance and context. You cannot control or verify which ones count, so it is a bad thing to plan around. Treat any authority from a nofollow link as a bonus, not the reason you pursued it.
Right-click the link, choose Inspect, and look at the <a> tag. If it contains rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc", it is not a plain dofollow link. If there is no rel attribute, it is dofollow. To audit a whole page at once, use an SEO browser extension or a backlink tool instead of checking links one by one.
Use a normal link when you genuinely vouch for the page. Use rel="sponsored" for anything paid, including affiliate links and sponsorships. Use rel="ugc" for links your users wrote, like blog comments and forum posts. Use rel="nofollow" when you want to reference a page without endorsing it, which is common for journalists linking to sources they are reporting on rather than recommending.
No. Paid links are supposed to be disclosed with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", and buying dofollow links to pass authority violates Google's link spam policies. It risks a manual action against your site. Earning links through useful content, directory submissions, and real outreach is slower and it is the only version that keeps working.
DanielLaunches gives you a directory checklist in your roadmap, a tracked link per submission, and a live domain rating check, so you can see the links adding up instead of hoping they are.
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