A dofollow link is a plain hyperlink that carries no nofollow-style attribute qualifying its endorsement — the informal label for a link left to pass authority normally rather than one flagged to hold it back.
| Term | Dofollow Link |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | Followed Link |
| Where it appears | Link analysis |
What it means in RankGear
There is no rel="dofollow" attribute in HTML; “dofollow” is simply how people describe a link that lacks a restricting relationship such as nofollow, sponsored, or ugc. In RankGear’s Link analysis, this distinction matters when an enabled backlink provider returns the links pointing at a page. Followed links are the ones a provider treats as passing endorsement, and they are what feed the referring-domain and authority figures you compare across a run — as opposed to links the source page has explicitly marked to withhold that signal.
How to interpret it
Read the dofollow count as one strand of a page’s link profile, not a score on its own. Keep the provider’s own value separate from whether that provider was even available for the run: an empty followed-link figure can mean a genuinely sparse profile or simply that no backlink source was enabled. When you do compare, compare like with like — authority and entity evidence only lines up when the pages were measured under the same run conditions and the same provider, because a followed link counted by one index is not interchangeable with one counted by another.
Example
You run Link analysis on a page and its top-ranking competitors with a backlink provider switched on. One competitor shows forty referring domains, but the followed subset — the dofollow links — is closer to twelve; the rest are nofollow mentions from forums and comment sections. That twelve, weighed against the same followed count for your own page, is the more honest comparison of endorsement-passing links between the two.
Important considerations
- “Dofollow” is a description, not a real HTML attribute — it just means the absence of a link relationship like
nofollow,sponsored, orugc. - Whether a link is reported as followed depends on the backlink provider; different providers use different indexes and crawl coverage, so counts will not match across tools.
- Provider metrics are comparative indicators built on their own scales, not Google scores, and a higher followed-link count does not by itself cause a page to rank.
- Followed-link figures only appear when a provider is enabled for the run; treat a blank as “not measured” unless you know a source was active.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.