Dofollow and nofollow links: what the rel attribute does

rel="nofollow" asks search engines not to count the link for ranking. rel="sponsored" marks a link that was paid for. rel="ugc" marks user-generated content such as comments. Google treats all three as hints to discount the link. A link with none of these values is what people call dofollow; dofollow is not itself a value you can write.

A directory that marks its product links nofollow still sends its own visitors to you, and its listings still appear in search when the pages are indexed. What the nofollow removes is the ranking benefit of the backlink. Whether that matters depends on why you wanted the listing; the point of publishing the attribute is that you know before submitting.

Directories change this setting, in both directions, without announcing it. When our crawler observes a directory's links flip, the change appears in the changelog.

We read the rel attributes on product links found on real listing pages, on a schedule. Each link we record is stored as one of four values: dofollow, nofollow, sponsored or ugc. What a directory says about its link policy is ignored; the markup we observed wins. The rules are on the methodology page.

A directory we have not read yet shows "unchecked" rather than a guess, and a directory can carry both kinds at once: the summary says what the majority of its observed links do, while the per-listing views keep each link's own attribute.