Dofollow is not an HTML attribute
This is the first thing to get straight, because half the netlinking market is priced on a misunderstanding. There is no rel="dofollow" anywhere in the HTML living standard. Open the spec, search the rel registry, you will not find it. What exists are the negative signals: rel="nofollow", and since 2019 its two cousins rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc". A « dofollow » link is just a plain anchor that carries none of those. The default state of every link you have ever written is dofollow.
So when a marketplace lists a placement as « dofollow » and charges more for it than for a « nofollow » slot, read what is actually happening: you are paying extra for the seller to not add a tag. That is the entire transaction. It sounds absurd phrased that way, and it should, because the inflated « dofollow premium » is one of the laziest pricing tricks in the business. The link is followable because the editor did nothing special, not because they did something valuable.
The reason the term stuck is historical. Before 2005 every link was followable, full stop. Google introduced nofollow to fight comment spam, the SEO community needed a word for « the normal kind », and « dofollow » was born as folk vocabulary. It never entered any specification. Two decades later we still use it because the operational distinction it points at, can Google credit this link or not, remains the question that decides whether a backlink is worth buying.
How dofollow actually works in 2026
The mechanics changed materially on 10 September 2019, when Google Search Central published « Evolving nofollow, new ways to identify the nature of links ». Three things happened at once. Google split the nofollow concept into three values, nofollow, sponsored and ugc. It announced these would be treated as hints rather than strict directives starting March 2020. And it confirmed it might follow and even index a link you marked nofollow if its systems judged it useful.
That last point is the one most operators have not internalised. The clean binary, dofollow equals equity passes, nofollow equals equity blocked, no longer describes reality. A dofollow link is now a link Google is allowed to follow by default and will weigh according to context, placement, surrounding content and the trust of the source. A nofollowed link is a link Google is hinted to treat cautiously, but may still crawl, follow and partially count. The signal is probabilistic, not boolean.
For a working SEO this means you stop thinking in terms of « did I get a dofollow ». You think in terms of: is this link in editorial body content, on a page that gets crawled, with topical relevance, and is it followable by default. A dofollow link buried in a footer link farm passes close to nothing despite being technically followable. A followable link inside a genuinely read article on a relevant media passes equity, and that is what you are actually buying. The attribute is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. If you want the inverse mechanic, read the companion entry on the nofollow side of the same coin, because the two only make sense together.
How do you verify it? View source and check the anchor, or use a crawler like Screaming Frog which flags the rel value per outlink. Browser extensions that highlight nofollow links are fine for spot checks but lie on JavaScript-injected links, so confirm in the raw HTML for anything you are paying for.
Where dofollow matters in a netlinking operation
In a paid link operation, dofollow is not a nice-to-have, it is the deliverable. If you pay an editor and the link comes back nofollowed, you have bought a brand mention and a referral-traffic channel, which has value, but you have not bought the thing netlinking exists to buy: a followable editorial signal that can move rankings. So the followable state is the floor, not a bonus tier.
This is exactly why, at stringer-network, we treat dofollow as the default state of every placement rather than an upsell line. When you place a paid link where the equity actually flows, the followable attribute is included because anything less would not be a backlink in the SEO sense. The honest version of the transaction prices the media, the editorial context and the topical fit, not the absence of a tag.
The second place dofollow matters is profile composition. Your dofollow-to-nofollow ratio is a footprint signal. Sites that earn links naturally accumulate a messy mix: followed editorial links, nofollowed social and forum links, ugc comment links, sponsored placements. A profile that is 100% followed reads as artificially built, because no organic acquisition pattern produces that. This is where dofollow connects to broader profile hygiene, and why a serious operator pairs link acquisition with a spread of anchor styles and link types rather than maximising followed links blindly.
The third place it matters is pacing. Stacking followable links too fast on a young site is the classic trigger discussed under the rhythm at which a site acquires links. A handful of strong dofollow links dripped over months beats a burst, which is why a campaign calibrated over several months outperforms a one-shot bulk order on almost every metric that matters.
What we see go wrong
The most common mistake is the all-dofollow obsession. Operators filter every placement for followable status and reject anything nofollowed, then end up with a profile that screams paid. The fix is counterintuitive: deliberately keep some nofollowed and ugc links in the mix, because a natural profile has them. You are not trying to maximise followed links, you are trying to look like a site that earns them.
The second mistake is ignoring the sponsored attribute on paid placements. Google's link spam guidelines are explicit: links that are paid for should be marked rel="sponsored" or nofollow. The Link Spam Update of March 2024, folded into the core ranking systems, increased Google's ability to neutralise links that do not follow this. The honest stance, and the one we operate, is that a paid editorial link can be both sponsored and editorially genuine. Pretending a paid link is unpaid by stripping disclosure is the kind of shortcut that ages badly. When the placement is a full article, editorial pieces written in-house let you control context without faking the link's nature.
The third mistake is treating dofollow as a quality proxy. It is not. A dofollow link from a thin, deindexed, off-topic PBN is worth less than a nofollowed link from a major national title that sends real readers. The attribute tells you what Google is permitted to do, not whether the link is good. From what we see in audits, the operators who win sort placements by source trust, topical relevance and real traffic first, and check the rel attribute last as a hygiene step, not a selection criterion.
The fourth, subtler, mistake is verifying once and assuming forever. Editors change CMS settings, plugins flip rel attributes globally, redesigns nofollow entire content zones. A link you bought as dofollow can silently become nofollow six months later. Any operation buying links at scale needs a periodic re-crawl of its live placements, because a followable link is only an asset while it stays followable. The contextual placement of the link inside body copy is far more stable than a sidebar or footer slot, which is one more reason to insist on in-content placement.
Tactical takeaways
Treat dofollow as the baseline expectation of any paid link, never as a premium tier you pay extra for. If a vendor quotes a « dofollow surcharge », that is a signal about the vendor, not the link. Verify rel status in raw HTML, not in a JavaScript-rendered extension, and re-verify your live links on a schedule. Build a profile that mixes followed, nofollowed, sponsored and ugc links, because the natural pattern is messy and the artificial one is clean. And rank your placement decisions by source trust and topical fit, using the followable attribute as a final hygiene check rather than the headline criterion. The operators who understand that dofollow is the absence of a tag, not a feature, stop overpaying for it and start buying the thing that actually moves rankings: editorial relevance from a source Google trusts.