Dofollow vs nofollow vs sponsored: what each link tag means

There is no dofollow attribute. A link is followed only when it carries none of the three values Google recognises on an outbound link — nofollow, sponsored and ugc — each of which tells a search engine to discount it, and sponsored is the one that marks an advertisement or paid placement. You cannot write rel="dofollow" and make a link count for more: dofollow is simply the state of a link nobody has marked.

That matters commercially, because it means the only way to know what your placement gave you is to read the page. There is no positive marker to look for. You are looking for the absence of three specific words — the three Google documents as the values a publisher can put on an outbound link. Two of them, sponsored and ugc, arrived alongside the older nofollow in September 2019.

The tokens that appear on press-release links

The last row is worth dwelling on, because it appears in the wild and it misleads people. One outlet we checked publishes business releases with rel="follow external noopener". That is a genuine dofollow link — but only because nofollow and sponsored are absent, not because the word follow is present. The same outlet publishes crypto releases with rel="sponsored noopener follow external". The word follow is still sitting right there, and the link still passes nothing, because sponsored is in the string.

If you are checking a placement, do not look for follow. Look for nofollow and sponsored. Only those two are defined anywhere: nofollow in the HTML standard, where it indicates that the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page, and sponsored in Google's documentation, which reserves it for advertisements and paid placements.

The four outcomes, as we found them

Reading the HTML of live press-release pages across eleven outlets, every client link fell into one of four states — and only the first two are the ones the industry ever discusses. The outlet-by-outlet table those readings came from is in why almost every press-release link is nofollow.

1. A dofollow link. No rel, or a rel containing only noopener and noreferrer. We found these on AP News (on one specific release — see the next article), MarketersMedia, Newsfile, FinancialContent, IT Business Net, Manila Times, The AI Journal, Macau Business, BlockTelegraph, MSN and TechBullion's business releases.

2. A nofollow link. The commonest outcome by a wide margin: Barchart (rel="nofollow noopener"), Street Insider (rel="nofollow", on all ten of its outbound links), Yahoo Finance, The Globe and Mail, Markets Insider, CoinMarketCap, NewsBreak, CentralCharts.

3. A link that does not point at you. GlobeNewswire's own release pages wrap client links in a globenewswire.com/Tracker redirect that itself carries nofollow. One Digital Journal page routed its two outbound links through a pr.report redirect, also nofollow, and neither pointed at the client's domain directly. A click still reaches your website. A search engine is following a link to the wire, not to you.

4. No link at all. OpenPR's release body contained zero anchor tags: the client's site appears in the media-contact block as plain, unclickable text. Digital Journal's ACCESS Newswire format did the same. The AP News copy of one GlobeNewswire release contained neither a link nor the client's URL as text anywhere on the page.

States three and four never appear in anyone's catalogue. They are roughly a third of what we opened.

Why noopener and noreferrer are not the enemy

These two turn up constantly and get mistaken for SEO markers. They are not.

noopener stops the page you link to from getting scripting access back to the page it was opened from. noreferrer stops the browser sending the referring URL onward. Both are browser behaviour, aimed at security and privacy. Neither has any bearing on whether a link passes search credit. A link marked rel="noopener noreferrer" and nothing else — which is exactly what we found on the MSN partner-publisher page — is a dofollow link.

Where the tag comes from, and who decides it

Nobody at the publication types these attributes by hand for your release. They come out of the template the syndication feed drops your copy into. That is why the answer can differ on the same masthead depending on which wire carried the release, and why it can differ on the same outlet depending on whether your announcement is a funding round or a token presale. Both effects are measured, and both are the subject of the next article.

The practical consequence: "Does AP News give dofollow links?" has no answer. "What did AP News do with this release, on this date?" has one, and it is readable in about a minute.

Read your own

1. Open your placement, right-click, choose View Page Source.
2. Search the source for your domain name.
3. Read the rel on the tag around it. nofollow or sponsored present means no credit passes. Neither present means it is a dofollow link.
4. If your domain does not appear in an anchor tag, check whether it appears as plain text. If it does, you have a mention and no link. If it does not appear at all, you have neither.
5. Check where the link actually points. If the href goes to a tracker or redirect on the wire's domain rather than to yours, treat it as state three above.

That is the entire check. It takes about two minutes per placement and it is the same check we run, set out at length in how to check a placement yourself. A sample report shows how each of those readings is written down when we run it across a whole distribution.

What the label means when you see it on this site

A link either passes search-engine credit to your site or it does not. Links that pass it are marked "dofollow". Links that do not are marked "nofollow". Most press links are nofollow, and that is standard publisher policy for press releases — not a fault in your announcement and not a worse placement.

We read the setting off the live published page, not off a rate card, so the label is the one a search engine sees. And an outlet reads "Unconfirmed" in our catalogue until we have checked it on a live page ourselves, which today is most of them — the same rule that leaves the domain-rating column empty. That is deliberate: an audit of the seven outlets we could inspect found three of our own inherited values wrong — OpenPR, Digital Journal and TechBullion — and every one of the three errors overstated what the buyer receives. OpenPR was listed as passing credit while publishing no outbound client link at all.

Two honest limits on all of this. First, dofollow means the publisher is not blocking search engines from counting the link; it is not a promise that your rankings move, and we will not make that promise. Second, an attribute is true of a page on a date. Publishers change these settings without telling anyone, which is why a link status is worth re-checking rather than filing.