What dofollow means
A dofollow backlink is just a normal link. The name is industry shorthand for any link that does not carry a rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc" attribute. Search engines can use standard links as signals when discovering pages and understanding how sites relate. That potential value is why buyers care about link attributes, but the dishonesty starts when vendors pretend they control markup on somebody else's publication.
What nofollow, sponsored, and ugc actually do
The three qualifying attributes describe the relationship around a link. Nofollow is the general-purpose qualification, sponsored identifies advertising or paid placement, and ugc marks user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. Google treats these attributes as hints for its systems rather than absolute commands. A qualified link from a strong, relevant article can still drive visitors, build awareness and help search engines discover a page. Google's link qualification guidance explains when each attribute should be used.
The part most vendors skip: who sets the attribute
The publisher does. Link attributes live in the hosting site's HTML, and the site's owner decides their linking policy. Some publications apply sponsored tags across whole sections. Some apply nofollow sitewide as standing policy, and that is as true of the biggest US and UK news sites as of niche titles. A vendor can pitch a story, make the expert input worth quoting, and choose targets whose policies favor standard links, but the final markup belongs to the person who owns the page. Any vendor guaranteeing 100 percent dofollow either controls the sites, which is a private network problem, or plans to argue with you later. We would rather tell you the truth on a public page.
What we deliver
Our links are dofollow wherever the publisher allows it, and target selection deliberately favors publications whose linking policies pass authority. In practice that means the large majority of links delivered on a monthly plan are dofollow backlinks in the plain sense: standard, followable links inside real articles. When a strong placement comes back with a qualifying attribute, we report it exactly as it is, with the URL, and you can see the markup yourself. You judge every link with your own eyes, which is worth more than any percentage we could put on this page. Our full vetting standard is on the link quality page.
How to check any link's attributes in ten seconds
Open the article, right-click the link, and inspect it. If the anchor tag has no rel attribute, or a rel that omits nofollow, sponsored, and ugc, it is a standard dofollow link. Browser extensions can highlight the difference at a glance if you check links often. We encourage every client to run this check on every URL we report, because a vendor whose work survives inspection has no reason to discourage inspecting it.
One last honest note: editorial coverage naturally produces a mixture of link attributes because publishers follow different policies. Judge each placement by relevance, readership, context and referral value as well as by the rel attribute; a qualified link is not automatically a useless link.