Dofollow Link

What is a Dofollow Link?

A dofollow link is any link with no “nofollow,” “UGC,” or “sponsored” attribute. Dofollow links can be followed by search engine crawlers and transfer link equity to the linking site, which influences the page rankings.
Here’s what a dofollow link looks like in page code:

<a href="https://ahrefs.com">Ahrefs</a>

You should also note that when there is a page-level “nofollow” meta directive, all links on that page automatically become nofollow.

Despite being widely used, “dofollow” is not a correct term because there’s no “dofollow” link attribute. We tend to call these links “followed” links here at Ahrefs.

Why are dofollow links important?

Dofollow links are essential for your backlink strategy; they’re crawlable and can help search engines discover more of your content.

They also pass link equity (or “link juice”) to the destination page, which is one of the most important Google ranking factors. While nofollow links only pass on referral traffic, dofollow links pass on traffic and equity, helping to improve both organic search rankings and traffic.

How to find dofollow links on a page?

1. Use “inspect” in your browser

To find out whether a link is dofollow or nonfollow, simply right-click on the link and select “Inspect” in your browser. This will open the rendered code of the page with the current element highlighted. If there’s no “nofollow” attribute in 

2. Highlight dofollow links with Ahrefs SEO Toolbar

Instead of checking the links manually, you can use Ahrefs SEO Toolbar (our free extension for Chrome and Firefox) to highlight all dofollow (or any other type of links) on the page.

How to find dofollow links to your website?

When checking backlinks to your website, you should differentiate between dofollow or nofollow. And Google’s tools (Google Search Console) don’t allow that.

To find out which of your backlinks are dofollow, go to Ahrefs Site Explorer and pull up either the Backlinks report or the Referring domains report. There you can apply a filter for “Dofollow” links only.