Free tool
Nofollow Link Checker
Check dofollow and nofollow links across up to 10 pages at once. Not just the rel attribute: also the page-level directives and headers that quietly cancel links which look perfectly clean. No signup.
Leave it empty to inventory every link on the page. Fill it in to check one specific backlink, and we will tell you if the link is missing entirely.
0 pages entered · free check covers the first 10
What a nofollow link checker does
A nofollow link checker fetches a page and reads the rel attribute on every link, flagging any that carry nofollow, ugc or sponsored, because Google does not pass ranking credit through those by default. This one also reads the three page-level signals that override the rel attribute entirely: a meta robots nofollow in the head, an X-Robots-Tag: nofollow response header, and a robots.txt rule that stops Googlebot fetching the page in the first place.
How to check if a link is nofollow
- 1Paste the page URL. Enter the URL of the page carrying the link, not the URL the link points to. Add up to 10 pages to check them in one run.
- 2Add your domain if you are checking one link. Fill in the "only show links to" field with your own domain and the results narrow to just the links pointing at you, with a clear verdict when the link is not on the page at all.
- 3Read the rel column, then the page-level banner. A link carrying nofollow, ugc or sponsored is not followed. Above the table, a banner appears if a page-level directive is nofollowing every link regardless of what each rel says.
Four things decide whether Google follows a link
The rel attribute is one of them. Most nofollow checkers and every browser extension stop there, which is how a link can show green in your tool and be discarded by Google.
- The rel attribute on the link
- rel="nofollow", rel="ugc" and rel="sponsored" all tell Google not to treat the link as an endorsement. This is the check every nofollow tool and browser extension performs, and it is the only one most of them perform.
- A page-level nofollow in the head
- <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> nofollows every link on the page at once. Each individual anchor can look perfectly clean in view-source and still pass nothing. <meta name="googlebot"> overrides it for Google specifically, so when a page carries both, the googlebot one is the one that counts.
- An X-Robots-Tag response header
- The same directive can be sent as an HTTP header instead of a tag. It is set by the server or the CDN, so it never appears in the HTML at all. No browser extension can see it, and neither can you unless you look at the response headers.
- A robots.txt rule blocking the page
- If robots.txt disallows the URL, Googlebot never fetches the page, so it never sees any link on it. The rel attributes are academic until that rule changes. This one catches out anyone auditing links on a staging or paginated path.
The last two have dedicated tools of their own if you want to dig in: the noindex checker reads the same meta and header directives for indexing, and the robots.txt tester shows which rule decided a URL.
Every rel value, and what it actually does
Three attributes stop a link passing credit, and one popular one does nothing at all.
| Attribute | What it means | Passes ranking credit? |
|---|---|---|
| no rel attribute | A normal, followed link. This is the default. | Yes |
| rel="nofollow" | Introduced in 2005 for comment spam. Since March 2020 Google treats it as a hint rather than a strict instruction. | No, by default |
| rel="ugc" | User generated content: comments, forum posts, profile links. Added in 2019 alongside sponsored. | No, by default |
| rel="sponsored" | Paid, affiliate or otherwise compensated placement. The correct attribute for any link you paid for. | No, by default |
| rel="dofollow" | Not a real attribute. It does nothing at all. A link is followed because it has no nofollow, ugc or sponsored, not because someone added dofollow. | Yes, but only because nothing blocks it |
Since March 2020 Google has described nofollow, ugc and sponsored as hints rather than strict instructions, meaning it may consider them for crawling and ranking. That is not a reason to count on them. Treat a nofollowed link as traffic and exposure, and expect no ranking credit from it.
Nofollow links in HTML
The markup itself, if you are the one adding the attribute rather than auditing it.
- A normal followed link
<a href="https://example.com">Example</a>- Nofollowed
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>- User generated content
<a href="https://example.com" rel="ugc">Example</a>- Paid or affiliate
<a href="https://example.com" rel="sponsored">Example</a>- Combined, and safe to combine
<a href="https://example.com" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener">Example</a>- Every link on the page at once
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">
In WordPress and most block editors the link dialog has a “mark as nofollow” or “sponsored” toggle that writes the same attribute for you. Whichever route you take, check the published page afterwards: the editor writing the attribute and the theme or a plugin stripping it back out are two different things.
Does your dofollow to nofollow ratio matter?
There is no target ratio, and no evidence Google scores one. A natural link profile is full of nofollowed links, because comments, forums, social profiles, news sites and almost every paid placement are nofollowed by policy rather than by choice. Chasing a number here optimises for a metric nobody is measuring.
The useful question is not how many of your links are nofollowed, it is which ones. A profile that is 80% nofollow is fine if the 20% that are followed are the placements you worked for. The same profile is a problem if the guest post you wrote, the directory you paid for and the roundup you pitched are all sitting in the nofollowed 80%. A ratio cannot tell those two situations apart. A per-link audit can, which is what the checker above produces.
Nofollow checker Chrome extensions, and where they stop
A good part of the demand here is for a browser extension rather than a web tool, and that is a fair instinct. Extensions such as NoFollow and Follow, Nofollow Link Checker on the Chrome Web Store outline or strike through the nofollowed links on whatever page you are viewing, with no pasting and no page load. For a single placement you are already looking at, that is faster than any web tool, this one included.
Install one. Then know the three places the whole category stops, because all three bite precisely when you are auditing links you paid for or worked to earn.
- One tab at a time. Checking 40 placements from an outreach campaign means opening 40 tabs and reading each one by eye, with no way to tell at a glance which of the 40 changed.
- They read the rendered page, not the response. An X-Robots-Tag: nofollow header lives in the HTTP response and never reaches the DOM, so the extension shows you a clean followed link that Google discards. The same blind spot applies to a robots.txt rule that stops Googlebot fetching the page at all.
- No record. There is nothing to export, diff or re-run next month, so you cannot tell when a link changed, only that it is different from what you remember.
So use both, for different jobs: an extension for the page in front of you, the checker above for a list you need to keep. It classifies every link on every page, reads the response headers an extension cannot, and copies out as CSV. There is a matching rundown of the index checker extensions if you want the same comparison for index status.
Followed is not the same as counted
A followed link still has to be on a page Google has crawled and kept. If the linking page is not in the index, the link is invisible to search no matter how clean its rel attribute is. That is a different question from the one this tool answers, and it needs a different check.
| Question | Answered by |
|---|---|
| Is this link followed? | This nofollow link checker |
| Is the link still on the page at all? | Both, using the domain filter above |
| Has Google indexed the linking page? | The backlink index checker |
| Is a page of my own indexed? | The bulk index checker |
Run the same list through the backlink index checker to add index status, or the bulk index checker for pages on your own site.
Link attributes change, and nobody tells you
A followed link becomes a nofollow during a redesign, a plugin update, or a policy change on the host site. Nothing notifies you, and the anchor looks identical on the page. A one-off check is a snapshot of something that moves.
Attribute change alerts
Know when a link you earned quietly picks up a nofollow.
Scheduled re-checks
Re-check the pages linking to you daily or every 6 hours, automatically.
Deindex alerts
Know which specific linking page dropped out of the index, and when.
Up to 20,000 URLs/mo
Plans scale from 100 URLs free to 20,000 a month, re-checks included.
See how the monitoring side works on the deindexing alerts page, or the full feature set.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I check if a link is nofollow?
- Paste the page URL into a nofollow link checker. It fetches the page and reads the rel attribute on every link, so a link carrying rel="nofollow", rel="ugc" or rel="sponsored" is flagged. Reading rel alone is not enough, though: a page-level meta robots nofollow, an X-Robots-Tag header or a robots.txt block can cancel links that look perfectly clean.
- What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow?
- A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow" and tells Google not to treat it as an endorsement. A dofollow link is simply a link with no such attribute. There is no rel="dofollow" in HTML: it is a name people gave to the default behaviour, and adding it to a link does nothing.
- Do nofollow links have any SEO value?
- Not as a ranking endorsement, by default. Since March 2020 Google treats nofollow, ugc and sponsored as hints it can consider or ignore, so a nofollowed link may occasionally be used, but you cannot count on it. Treat nofollowed links as traffic and brand exposure rather than as ranking signals.
- Can I check nofollow links in bulk?
- Yes. Paste up to 10 page URLs at once and every link on each page is classified in one run, with the results downloadable as CSV. That is what makes this different from a browser extension, which can only look at the tab you have open.
- Why does a link look dofollow but still pass nothing?
- Three reasons a rel check misses. The page may carry a page-level nofollow in its meta robots tag, the server may send an X-Robots-Tag: nofollow header that never appears in the HTML, or robots.txt may block the URL so Googlebot never fetches the page at all. This checker reports all three.
- Does the dofollow to nofollow ratio matter?
- There is no target ratio, and no evidence Google scores one. A natural link profile contains plenty of nofollowed links because comments, forums, social profiles and most paid placements are nofollowed by policy. What matters is which specific links are nofollowed: if the placements you paid for or worked hardest to earn are the nofollowed ones, that is a problem the ratio would never show you.
- How do I add a nofollow link in HTML?
- Add the rel attribute to the anchor: <a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example</a>. Use rel="sponsored" for paid and affiliate links and rel="ugc" for comments and forum posts. You can combine them, for example rel="sponsored nofollow". To nofollow every link on a page at once, put <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> in the head instead.
- Should internal links ever be nofollow?
- Rarely. Nofollowing internal links does not save crawl budget or sculpt PageRank the way it did before 2009, and it mostly just stops Google following paths through your own site. The usual exceptions are links into login, cart or filtered URLs you do not want crawled, and even there a robots.txt rule or a canonical is normally the better instrument.
- Does Google always respect nofollow?
- No. Since March 2020 Google has treated nofollow, ugc and sponsored as hints rather than directives, so it may still crawl and consider a nofollowed link. That cuts both ways: you cannot rely on a nofollowed link passing value, and you cannot rely on nofollow to keep a URL out of the index. Use noindex or robots.txt for that.
- Do I need a Chrome extension to check nofollow links?
- No, and an extension cannot do the whole job. Extensions highlight nofollow links on the page you are viewing, one tab at a time, and they read the rendered DOM rather than the response headers, so an X-Robots-Tag nofollow is invisible to them. Use one for spot checks and a bulk checker for a list.
- Is this nofollow link checker free?
- Yes, with no signup. Free use covers 10 pages per run and 100 pages per day, because every check fetches the whole page. A free SearchOptimo account raises the limit and re-checks the pages on a schedule, so you are told when a followed link becomes a nofollow.
Related tools: backlink index checker, canonical tag checker, and indexability checker.
Check them once. Then watch them.
Run a free check above, then put those pages on a monitoring schedule so you hear about a link that changed in hours, not quarters. Free plan, no credit card.