Link attributes & basics · Knowledge
Is there such a thing as a “dofollow” attribute?
Short answer: no. rel=“dofollow” appears in no HTML specification and no search-engine documentation – a link without nofollow simply is a normal, value-passing link. Follow is the default state, not an attribute.
The word survives as industry slang because it is useful in conversation (“we need a dofollow link”) – harmless as jargon, wrong as markup.
Where the non-word came from – and why writing it into HTML is worse than useless
The term is a back-formation: once nofollow existed (2005), the world needed a word for its absence – and “dofollow” rolled off the tongue better than “a link without rel=nofollow”. Link marketplaces cemented it, because “dofollow guaranteed” sells better than a grammar lesson. As slang between humans it does no harm; problems start when someone types it into markup. rel=“dofollow” is an unknown token: browsers ignore it, search engines ignore it – the link behaves exactly as it would without it, so at best you shipped dead weight. The subtler damage is semantic drift in tools and audits: filters that search for “links with dofollow” find nothing and report zero, while the site is full of perfectly normal follow links; conversely, writing the token can trip naive parsers and QA rules that whitelist known rel values. Precise language for reports and briefings: “follow link” or “normal link” for the default, “nofollow link” (or ugc/sponsored) for the marked kind. And a bridge to the practical world: because follow is the default, a site's real question is never “how do I add dofollow” but “which links should lose the default” – the exact question tools like our JNofollow plugin exist to answer site-wide (labelled in-house recommendation), with bypasses for the links that should keep it.
Key facts
- No spec, no engine knows rel=“dofollow” – follow is the default state of every link.
- Origin: back-formation after 2005, cemented by link marketplaces.
- In markup: dead weight at best, parser confusion at worst.
- Precise wording: follow/normal link vs. nofollow (ugc, sponsored) link.
- The real site question: which links should lose the default – not how to add it.