What is dofollow?

Dofollow is a normal hyperlink: link equity can pass to the destination. HTML has no rel="dofollow". A plain <a href="..."> with no rel is what the industry calls a dofollow link.

Crawlers follow it and treat the destination as endorsed by the source. When people talk about earning backlinks, they usually mean this kind.

nofollow

The counterpart is nofollow. rel="nofollow" tells a search engine you do not vouch for the destination. Ads and untrusted outbound links are the usual cases. Passing of ranking value is suppressed.

Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint, not a hard directive. It is not guaranteed to be ignored, or obeyed.

sponsored and ugc

Other rel values describe what the link is. They also suppress ranking signals, for different reasons. You can combine them.

• rel="sponsored". Paid placement, affiliate, anything with money. Google added it in 2019
• rel="ugc". Comments, forums, anything a third party can write. You are saying you cannot stand behind it
• They stack. rel="ugc nofollow" is valid

noreferrer

noreferrer is not an SEO attribute. It stops the browser from sending a Referer header (where the click came from). Privacy and security, not rankings.

Opening a new tab with target="_blank" can let the destination reach back through window.opener. Pairing rel="noopener noreferrer" is the usual fix. It does not, by itself, change link equity.

Which one to use

• No rel (dofollow). A normal citation. Equity can pass
• nofollow. You do not want to pass value
• sponsored. Ads and PR
• ugc. User-submitted
• noreferrer. No Referer. No direct ranking effect

Decide whether the link is a trusted mention, an ad, or something anyone can type into a form. Then pick the rel that matches.

How Notus treats links

Product pages on Notus always link out with noreferrer. A new listing starts as nofollow. Until the community has voted, it is not treated as evaluated content.

At 50 upvotes or more, the listing is treated as evaluated content and the official URL becomes dofollow. That is the point where ranking value can pass to the site.

An approved listing is a public URL. The href is the official site you submitted. One listing adds one referring domain: Notus.