Do follow is the default HTML attribute state for hyperlinks, instructing search engines to transfer link equity and crawl through to the destination page. Understanding do follow links versus their nofollow counterparts determines how you build authority, sculpt crawl paths, and manage your site's relationship with external domains.
When a hyperlink contains no rel attribute restricting it, that link is do follow by default. Search engine crawlers encounter the anchor, follow the href to the destination URL, and transfer a portion of the source page's authority through the link graph. This flow of equity—historically called PageRank in Google's ecosystem—accumulates at the destination, influencing its ability to rank for competitive queries.
The mechanics are straightforward: an <a href="example.com">anchor</a> with no rel="nofollow" or rel="ugc" modifier tells Googlebot and other crawlers to treat the link as an editorial vote. The destination URL enters the crawler's queue if not already discovered, the referring domain relationship registers in the link index, and ranking signals propagate based on the source page's own authority, relevance, and the anchor text used. This process repeats billions of times daily across the web, creating the connected graph that powers search relevance.
Your internal linking strategy relies entirely on do follow behavior to distribute authority from high-equity pages like your homepage to deeper conversion pages, category hubs, and long-tail content. If you mistakenly nofollow your main navigation links or category breadcrumbs, you fragment your site's equity flow and leave important pages underpowered.
Consider a typical e-commerce hierarchy: homepage links to category pages, categories link to products, products link back to related categories. Every do follow link in that chain moves authority downward and sideways, helping newer product pages compete faster. Strategic internal do follow links also guide crawl priority—pages receiving more internal equity and link volume get crawled more frequently, ensuring fresh content enters the index quickly. Disrupting this flow with unnecessary nofollow attributes creates indexing delays and ranking drag on pages you actually want to perform.
When you link to an external domain with a do follow link, you signal to search engines that you consider that resource relevant, trustworthy, and worth associating with your content. This is why Google's early algorithm treated links as votes—do follow connections represented genuine editorial endorsement, not just navigation.
Publishers should do follow link to authoritative sources that support their claims: government data repositories, peer-reviewed research, industry standards bodies, reputable news outlets. These outbound do follow links add credibility to your content and help search engines understand topical context. Conversely, linking do follow to low-quality directories, link farms, or unrelated commercial sites dilutes your own authority and risks algorithmic penalties if the pattern looks manipulative. The rule is simple: if you genuinely recommend the destination and it adds value for your reader, do follow it. If the link exists for payment, partnership quid-pro-quo, or user-generated reasons, apply the appropriate nofollow, sponsored, or ugc attribute.
Many sites unintentionally nofollow their own pagination links, tag archives, or filtering parameters, blocking crawlers from discovering entire segments of content. Others add nofollow to editorial blog links out of misplaced caution, thinking they are preserving PageRank when they are actually hoarding it ineffectively.
To audit your do follow versus nofollow distribution, crawl your site with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and filter link reports by rel attribute. Look for patterns: Are key internal navigation elements marked nofollow? Are external links to authoritative sources incorrectly nofollowed? Are category pages linking to products with follow attributes, or has a plugin injected nofollow broadly? For external backlinks pointing to your site, use Google Search Console's Links report or Ahrefs to identify which inbound links are do follow—those carry the ranking weight you need. A healthy profile shows do follow links from relevant, authoritative domains, not just forums and comment spam.
Where you place do follow links within your content influences both user behavior and how search engines interpret your page's purpose. Prominent do follow links in the introduction or first H2 section signal primary topics and related resources, while links buried in footers or sidebars carry less weight.
For internal linking, embed do follow anchors contextually within body copy using relevant keyword phrases that describe the destination page. Avoid generic "click here" anchors; instead, use descriptive text like "technical SEO audit process" or "local citation building" that helps both users and crawlers understand what they will find. Limit do follow external links to a reasonable number per article—ten or fifteen substantive references are credible, fifty dilute focus and risk looking like link schemes. When linking out do follow, open in the same tab unless the destination is a tool or reference users will return to; new-tab links are a UX decision, not an SEO one, and do not change do follow equity transfer.
Google introduced rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored" to distinguish user-generated content and paid placements from editorial do follow links. If you run a forum, blog comments, or Q&A section where users insert links, those should carry rel="ugc" by default to prevent spam manipulation. Similarly, any link placed because of payment—sponsored posts, affiliate links, paid directory listings—must use rel="sponsored" to comply with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Failure to mark these links appropriately risks manual actions or algorithmic devaluation. The mistake many site owners make is thinking nofollow is always the safest choice; in reality, ugc and sponsored are more semantically precise and let Google's algorithms weigh the context properly. A legitimate do follow link from an earned guest post on a reputable industry blog carries far more value than a paid sponsored link, even if both point to the same destination. The distinction lies in the editorial judgment behind the link—do follow reflects genuine recommendation, while sponsored reflects a commercial relationship disclosed to the search engine.
Large sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs face crawl budget constraints—Googlebot allocates limited resources to each domain, and internal do follow links influence which pages get crawled most often. If you indiscriminately do follow link to every tag, archive, and parameter variation, you waste crawl budget on low-value pages while important product or content pages wait.
Use nofollow or disallow in robots.txt for faceted navigation, session IDs, and infinite scroll pagination that generates duplicate content. Reserve do follow links for your primary navigation hierarchy, cornerstone content, and pages you actively want indexed and ranked. Monitor crawl stats in Google Search Console to identify pages consuming budget without delivering traffic, then adjust your internal do follow linking or canonicalization strategy. The goal is not to hoard do follow links miserly, but to guide crawlers efficiently to the URLs that matter for your business, ensuring fresh content gets discovered and updated pages re-crawled promptly.
Do follow links pass ranking signals and allow search engine crawlers to follow the link to the destination, while nofollow links contain the rel="nofollow" attribute that instructs crawlers not to transfer equity or treat the link as an endorsement. Do follow is the default state; nofollow must be explicitly added to the HTML.
No. Links are do follow by default. You only need to add a rel attribute if you want to modify the link's behavior—such as rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc". Adding rel="dofollow" does nothing because do follow is the implicit standard when no rel attribute is present.
Most internal links should be do follow to distribute authority and guide crawlers through your site architecture. Exceptions include links to login pages, search result parameters, and duplicate archive pages where you want to conserve crawl budget. Nofollowing your main navigation or breadcrumb links is almost always a mistake.
Linking do follow to authoritative, relevant sources strengthens your content's credibility. Problems arise when you do follow link to low-quality, spammy, or unrelated sites, or when the volume of outbound links suggests manipulation rather than editorial judgment. Quality and relevance matter more than quantity.
Search engine crawlers parse the HTML of each page and examine the anchor tag. If the <a> element has no rel attribute restricting it, the crawler treats it as do follow by default and processes it as a signal for ranking and crawling. The presence of rel="nofollow", rel="ugc", or rel="sponsored" changes that behavior.
The linking site chose to add a nofollow, ugc, or sponsored attribute to the anchor tag. This often happens in user-generated content like forums and comments, or in paid placements. Nofollow backlinks still send referral traffic and can contribute to brand visibility, but they do not directly pass ranking equity like do follow links do.