Nofollow Links: How Many Placed Links Are Really Followed?

What we measured

bklink audits the links people place: a customer uploads the list a vendor or PR distributor delivered, and the audit reads every page. For this report we took the latest reading of every placed link on record — 4,449 links on 3,003 sites — as of 12 October 2026, and counted how each one was marked.

Disclosure. These are placements our users chose to audit, including our own accounts' — not a random sample of the web. Pages a backlink scan found (mentions nobody arranged) are left out: only links someone placed say how a site treats a link it was given.

The short answer

Of the 2,620 links the audit found on the page, 1,638 (63%) were nofollow and 982 (37%) were followed.

What nofollow, sponsored and ugc mean

A link's rel attribute tells search engines what kind of link it is. Google defines three values (Google Search Central):

• sponsored — advertisements and paid placements;
• ugc — user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts;
• nofollow — for when the other values don't apply.

Google says links marked with these values "will generally not be followed". A link with none of them is a normal, followed link. A nofollow link is not worthless — it can still send visitors — but it is not asking search engines to pass credit.

How the links were marked

The audit records each link's rel as the page wrote it (since late September 2026; 1,328 of the 1,638 nofollow links have it):

• 1,326 said nofollow, and 2 said ugc nofollow;
• 0 used sponsored.

Google's spam policies ask that paid placements carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" (spam policies: link spam). In this record, sites that qualified a placed link used nofollow — never sponsored.

On the followed side, 327 links carried rel="dofollow". Google's documentation defines no such value: a link without nofollow, sponsored or ugc is followed whether or not it says "dofollow", so the word does nothing. Another 411 followed links carried only browser values such as noopener or noreferrer, which are about the browser, not search engines.

By type of site

Site type is our classifier's reading of each site's homepage: what the site is mainly for.

• Press-release copies are mostly nofollow: 84% of the links found on syndication sites were nofollow.
• Publishers split about evenly: 50% of the links found on publishers' pages were nofollow.
• A missing link is its own problem. On company sites and directories the most common finding was no link at all — the page answered, but the link was not on it.

"No link" and "could not be read" are not nofollow

• No link on the page means the page answered and carried no link to the site: the link was never added, was removed, or is drawn only by script after the page loads.
• Could not be read means the page blocked our reader, timed out or answered an error, so the audit cannot say what it shows.

Neither is counted as nofollow above.

How to check if a link is nofollow

1. Open the page and view its source (or inspect the link). Find the <a href> that points to your site.
2. Read its rel. nofollow, sponsored or ugc mean the site is asking search engines not to count it. noopener and noreferrer don't change that; dofollow means nothing.
3. Check the page's robots meta tag too. <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> asks Google not to follow any link on the page (robots meta tag).
4. Check again later. A link can be changed or removed after it is placed.

A bklink audit reads every link in a list this way, and a re-check reads them again over time. For which sites kept placed links followed, see mxverify's audited link record.

Method and limits

• Each link's state is its latest audit, or its latest monthly re-check that read the page; later evidence that the page is gone (404, 410, no DNS) makes it dead.
• The audit classifies a link from its own <a> tag: any link to the site without nofollow, sponsored or ugc makes the page "followed". It does not read the page-level robots meta tag.
• rel as written has been stored only since late September 2026, so the rel counts cover the links audited since then.
• One reading per link. A link can change the day after; the next edition re-reads the record and says what changed.