There is no such thing as a "do-follow" attribute. It is industry shorthand for a link with no rel attribute restricting it — the default state of any ordinary link. Everything else is a modifier the publisher adds.
The four states
| Markup | Publisher is saying | Passes equity |
|---|---|---|
<a href="..."> | This is a normal editorial reference | Yes |
rel="nofollow" | I am not vouching for this | Treated as a hint |
rel="sponsored" | This is paid or an affiliate | Treated as a hint |
rel="ugc" | A user added this, not us | Treated as a hint |
The important change, in place since 2019: these are hints rather than directives. Google reserves the right to consider a no-follow link for ranking and discovery purposes. In practice you should assume a no-follow passes little or nothing — but "zero" is not guaranteed and the distinction is less absolute than it used to be.
What each one is worth in practice
Standard follow links
What a link building programme is primarily buying. Full equity, full relevance signal, plus referral traffic and brand exposure.
No-follow
Little or no equity, and still worth having in three respects. It carries referral traffic — a no-follow link on a publication read by your buyers sends the same visitors as a follow one. It contributes brand and entity signal, because your company is named in a context search engines and language models process regardless of the attribute. And it contributes to profile realism, discussed below.
Sponsored
The correct label for paid placement. Publications applying it are following the guidelines properly. Worth knowing: a placement sold as follow that publishes with rel="sponsored" has not been delivered as specified — this is a common quiet substitution and it is why the attribute belongs in your verification record.
UGC
Comments, forum posts, community contributions. Rarely worth pursuing deliberately. Occasionally valuable where the community is genuinely your buyer's habitat, and then for the traffic rather than the link.
Why zero no-follow links is a red flag
Consider what a naturally earned profile looks like. Some publications no-follow all external links by policy. Some apply it to contributed content. Wikipedia no-follows everything. Most large news organisations no-follow liberally. Social platforms no-follow by default.
A company genuinely being written about accumulates a mix — commonly 20–40% no-follow across a mature profile.
A profile that is 98% follow has been assembled by someone filtering for follow links. That is not what earning coverage looks like, and the pattern is visible.
The follow ratio as a diagnostic
| Follow share | Usually indicates |
|---|---|
| Under 50% | Heavy social, forum or news coverage; often a strong brand |
| 60–80% | Healthy mix of earned and built |
| 85–95% | Active link building programme, still plausible |
| Over 95% | Filtered acquisition — worth explaining |
Read this as a diagnostic rather than a target. Do not go and acquire no-follow links to improve a ratio; that is optimising the symptom. The point is that a programme which never accepts a no-follow placement is selecting inventory in a way that eventually becomes visible.
What this means when buying
Specify the expectation, then verify it. If you are paying for follow placements, the attribute belongs in the verification record for every link. Checking it manually takes ten seconds per placement and catches quiet substitutions.
Recheck at 90 days. Publications sometimes apply nofollow sitewide after publication — a policy change, a new SEO consultant, a decision to reduce outbound equity. A link that was follow at delivery may not be follow now, and nobody will tell you.
Do not refuse good coverage over an attribute. A mention in a major trade publication that no-follows all external links is worth having. The referral traffic, the credibility with a buying committee, and the chance of being the source an answer engine cites are all unaffected by rel.
The best link we have ever placed for a client was no-follow. It was in a publication their entire buying committee reads, it produced 40 demo requests in six weeks, and it passed no PageRank whatsoever.
A note on answer engines
Language models building answers from web content are not applying PageRank. When a model summarises the options in a software category, what matters is that your product is named in sources it treats as reliable — and the rel attribute on a link within that source is not part of that calculation.
This is a genuine shift in how to value coverage. Placements that were previously discounted for being no-follow now carry a second kind of value that has nothing to do with equity, and the gap between "link" and "mention" has narrowed accordingly.
The practical position
Buy follow links, because that is what moves rankings. Verify the attribute on every placement, because substitution happens. Recheck periodically, because attributes change. And accept good no-follow coverage when it appears, because a profile without any is describing how it was built.