Dofollow Links vs Nofollow Links: Why One Real News Backlink Beats 100 Paid Posts

If you have ever been quoted a price for “100 dofollow links,” this post is for you. I have spent more than 25 years in PR, at top New York agencies and in-house at the NBA and NASCAR, and the question I hear most from buyers who are new to this is some version of: what are dofollow links, what are nofollow links, and why does the difference matter so much to my Google ranking?

The short answer is that dofollow links are the backlinks (a clickable link from another website, such as a news story, to your website, which lifts your Google ranking) that Google is allowed to count in your favor. Nofollow links carry a tag that tells Google not to treat them as an endorsement. That one tag separates a backlink that helps you rank from a backlink that mostly does not.

The longer answer is where the money is. Most of what is sold online as dofollow links is paid posts on sites nobody reads, and Google has spent two decades building systems to stop those from counting. In this post I will explain both kinds of link in plain English, show you how to check any link in ten seconds, and explain how we at Prism earn dofollow links from real newsrooms without buying one.

What dofollow links are, in plain English

Every link on the web is built from a bit of code called an anchor tag. By default, that tag tells search engines two things: follow this link to the page it points to, and treat it as a vote for that page. Links that do both are what the SEO industry calls dofollow links. Ahrefs defines a dofollow link as “any link with no ‘nofollow,’ ‘UGC,’ or ‘sponsored’ attribute”. There is no dofollow tag. Dofollow links are dofollow simply because nobody added a tag that says otherwise.

Here is what one looks like in page code:

`<a href=”https://yoursite.com”>your company</a>`

Why does Google care? Because links are one of the oldest signals in search. Google’s own documentation says it “uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.” Its How Search Works page is more direct about quality: “one of the factors used to determine quality is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content. This is generally a good sign that the information is trustworthy.”

That sentence contains the whole business case. The word is prominent. Dofollow links from The Wall Street Journal or USA Today are votes from websites Google already trusts. Dofollow links from a blog that exists only to sell links are votes from nobody. Both are technically dofollow links. Only one kind moves your ranking.

For a wider primer on how backlinks fit into a ranking strategy, start with our guide What Is Link Building? and our rundown of the types of backlinks.

What nofollow links are, and why Google invented them

Nofollow is a tag a website adds to a link to say: do not treat this as my endorsement. In code it is the rel attribute:

`<a href=”https://yoursite.com” rel=”nofollow”>your company</a>`

Google introduced nofollow in 2005 “as a means to help fight comment spam,” according to its Search Central blog, and it “quickly became one of Google’s recommended methods for flagging advertising-related or sponsored links.” In 2019 Google split the idea into three tags:

• rel=”sponsored” for “advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links).”
• rel=”ugc” for user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
• rel=”nofollow” for any link where the site does not “want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.”

The same 2019 announcement changed how Google reads these tags. When nofollow was introduced, Google “would not count any link marked this way as a signal.” Since 2019, all three tags “are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search,” and nofollow became a hint for crawling and indexing as of March 1, 2020.

What that means for a buyer: nofollow links are not worthless, and dofollow links are not a guaranteed win. Google decides. But the tag still tells Google which way the publisher leaned, and Google’s guidance asks publishers to tag exactly the links you would pay for: advertisements, paid placements, and user comments. In my experience, the links reporters write into their stories because the source was useful are plain, untagged dofollow links.

How to tell if a link is dofollow

You do not need a tool. Any link on any page can be checked in about ten seconds:

1. Open the page, right-click the link, and choose Inspect (Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all have it, and Safari has it once the Develop menu is turned on).
2. Look at the highlighted line that starts with `<a href=`.
3. If it has no rel attribute, or a rel that only says noopener or noreferrer, the link is dofollow. If it says nofollow, sponsored, or ugc, it is not.

Two things trip people up. First, noopener and noreferrer are browser security settings, not SEO tags, so a link with rel=”noopener” still counts among your dofollow links. Second, the publisher sets the tag, not you, so check a few links on the same outlet before you assume its policy.

If you are reading an agency report, look for the link type on each backlink, and ask if it is missing. We list it for every backlink we report, because under our pay-for-performance model we only bill for dofollow backlinks.

Why paid posts cannot give you dofollow links that count

Here is the pitch you will get from a link seller: 100 dofollow links from “high DA” sites for a few hundred dollars. BuzzStream’s survey of digital PR practitioners put the going rate for guest posting at about $150 per link, against about $800 for large hero campaigns. Cheap is the appeal. Here is the problem.

Google’s rules put the seller in a trap. Its documentation says links that are “advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links)” must be marked with rel=”sponsored”. A paid post that follows the rule gives you a sponsored link, which is by definition not one of the dofollow links you were promised. A paid post that breaks the rule is link spam. Google’s spam policy lists “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as link spam and spells out what counts, starting with “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links.” Sites that violate the policy “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”

Google enforces this with software too. In December 2022 it announced a link spam update built on SpamBrain, its AI-based spam-prevention system, which “can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.” Google said that as spammy links are neutralized, “any credit passed by these unnatural links are lost.”

In plain English, the 100 paid posts either carry a tag that tells Google to ignore them, or they get detected and ignored anyway, or they get your site penalized.

That is why we never recommend paid or sponsored placements, and why we wrote 7 Dead Giveaways of a Low-Value Link Building Agency. If a vendor guarantees a set number of dofollow links at a fixed price from sites you have never heard of, you are being sold the thing Google built nofollow to stop. Our post on editorial links vs paid posts shows the same gap in returns.

What one real news backlink does that paid posts cannot

Now the other side. Editorial dofollow links are the ones a journalist adds to a story because your company was the source: your data, your expert, or your announcement. Nobody paid for them, so there is no sponsored tag and nothing for SpamBrain to catch. They sit in stories on sites Google already treats as prominent.

That is the first thing they do: they are real votes. The second is that people read them, and a story in CNBC or USA Today sends readers who already care about the subject. The third is newer. AI tools build their answers from sources they trust, and Muck Rack’s May 2026 analysis of AI citations found that about 84% of citations come from earned media, journalism alone accounts for about 27%, and “paid and advertorial content accounts for just 0.3% of all citations.” If you want ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overviews to name your company, the path we recommend runs through earned stories, which we explain in How to Get Your Brand Mentioned in ChatGPT and How Google AI Overviews Choose Their Sources.

Our case studies show what this looks like at scale. For Social Catfish, an online safety company, an annual State of Online Scams industry study earned 3,862 editorial backlinks at an average DA of 77.3, and the company’s revenue grew 372%. For CareScout, a Genworth Financial company, 173 stories from January to September 2026, 117 of them with a backlink, took its Ahrefs Domain Rating from 61 to 74. Seniorly earned 317 stories with editorial backlinks in 2025 from monthly data-driven industry studies, and was acquired by CareScout that October.

So when I say one real news backlink beats 100 paid posts, I am not quoting a statistic. I am telling you what I have watched for 25 years: the paid posts show up in a spreadsheet and nowhere else, and the one real story shows up in Google, in the client’s inbox, and now in AI answers.

Do nofollow links help SEO at all?

The honest answer is: sometimes, a little, and not in the way you want.

Since Google’s 2019 change, nofollow is a hint rather than a command, so Google can choose to count a nofollow link. I would not build a strategy on it. What a nofollow link reliably does is everything a link did before search engines existed. It puts your name in front of readers. It sends the ones who care to your site. And it tells a reporter at another outlet that a colleague already found you credible, which is often how the next story, and the next of your dofollow links, happens.

The practical rule I give clients has three parts. Never turn down a nofollow link from a real outlet. Never pay for a nofollow link. Never let a report count nofollow links as if they were dofollow links. And when a reporter mentions your company without any link at all, ask politely for one. In our experience, many do. We do that work for clients as backlink reclamation, and it is often the cheapest dofollow link a company will ever earn.

How we at Prism earn dofollow links from real newsrooms

Reporters add links because they are citing a source, so the job is to become the source.

Our method is a newsworthy, data-driven industry study. We take public data (federal statistics, industry filings, or your own anonymized customer data), rank it in a way that is new, usually state by state, and pitch the findings to the reporters who cover that beat. A reporter in Ohio writes about where Ohio ranks and links to the industry study on your website. Those are plain, untagged, editorial dofollow links from newsrooms, the kind Google’s own documentation describes as a sign of trustworthy content. Company-wide, Prism has placed more than 25,000 stories and earned 20,000 backlinks.

There are two ways to buy it:

• Pay-for-performance linkbuilding. The newsworthy, data-driven industry study is $1,999, and it is projected to earn 5 to 20 media placements. After that, you pay only for each dofollow backlink from a site with an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 50 or higher. No backlinks, no invoice. Details are on our SEO linkbuilding page.
• Full-service PR and linkbuilding from $7,500 a month on a 12-month engagement, with 6 to 12 industry studies a year plus daily media relations. Our PR services page explains what is included.

Our post on what a PR agency costs explains what to expect at each level, the case studies page has the full results, and our SEO, AEO and GEO page shows how earned backlinks feed AI answers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does dofollow link mean?

A dofollow link is an ordinary link with no nofollow, sponsored, or ugc tag. Search engines can follow it and count it as a vote for the page it points to. Dofollow links from prominent websites are the backlinks that help a site rank in Google.

How do I know if a link is dofollow?

Right-click the link, choose Inspect, and read the rel attribute on the anchor tag. No rel attribute, or only noopener or noreferrer, means the link is dofollow. A rel that includes nofollow, sponsored, or ugc means it is not.

What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links?

Dofollow links carry no tag and can pass ranking credit to the page they point to. Nofollow links carry a rel=”nofollow” tag that tells search engines the publisher is not endorsing the page. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a command, but the tag still signals which way the publisher leaned.

Are nofollow links good for SEO?

Nofollow links from real outlets are worth having because they bring readers, brand searches, and credibility with other reporters, and Google can treat them as hints. They are not a substitute for dofollow links.

Can I buy dofollow links?

You can buy posts that contain links, but Google requires paid placements to carry a rel=”sponsored” tag, which tells Google not to credit the link, and it classes buying links for ranking purposes as link spam. Untagged paid links can be neutralized by SpamBrain or draw a penalty, so buying dofollow links is a bad bet.

Do backlinks still matter in 2026?

Yes. Google’s current documentation still describes links as a signal for relevance and for finding new pages, and names links from prominent websites as a sign of trustworthy content. Muck Rack’s 2026 research found that AI tools draw about 84% of their citations from earned media, so the stories that produce editorial dofollow links now shape AI answers too.

The one question to ask any link vendor

Before you pay anyone for dofollow links, ask one question: can you show me the story a reporter wrote, and the untagged link inside it? If the answer is a list of sites you have never heard of, you know what you would be buying.

If you would rather earn the real thing, contact us and we will show you what a newsworthy, data-driven industry study in your category could look like, and what it is projected to earn.