Dofollow vs nofollow backlinks from directories: what actually helps

Ask in any founder community whether a directory is worth submitting to and someone will reply "only if it's dofollow". It is the most repeated piece of directory advice and the least examined.

Here is what Google's own documentation says, what it does not say, and what we think the attribute is actually worth.

What the attributes are

There is no rel="dofollow". It is not a thing Google defined; it is a community term for the absence of the other attributes. A plain <a href="..."> is what people mean by dofollow.

The three that exist:

Those are quoted from Google's Qualify your outbound links page, which is the current documentation. On effect, it says: "Links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed."

The "hints" thing, stated precisely

In September 2019, Google published a blog post introducing sponsored and ugc which contained this line:

All the link attributes—sponsored, ugc, and nofollow—are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search.

This got repeated everywhere as "nofollow links now pass PageRank", which is not what it says. The same post is explicit about what did not change:

In most cases, the move to a hint model won't change the nature of how we treat such links. We'll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes.

Worth noting: the word "hint" appears in that 2019 blog post and nowhere on the current documentation page, which uses "generally not be followed" instead. So the honest summary is that a nofollowed link is usually not counted for ranking, Google reserves the right to make exceptions, and nobody outside Google knows how often they do.

Two dates from the same post, if you need them: the attributes became ranking hints on 10 September 2019, and nofollow became a crawling and indexing hint on 1 March 2020.

What Google says about directories specifically

The spam policies page has a list of things that count as link spam. The directory item is exactly five words:

Low-quality directory or bookmark site links.

That is the whole bullet. Google does not define "low-quality" there, and every elaboration you have read is somebody's interpretation.

Three other bullets from the same list are more directly relevant to how directories are monetised:

• "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes"
• "Requiring a link as part of a Terms of Service, contract, or similar arrangement without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link"
• "Text advertisements or text links that don't block ranking credit"

And the escape hatch, verbatim:

Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes. It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value.

Read those together and a shape emerges. A directory that charges for a listing and gives you a followed link is, by Google's own description, selling links. A directory that charges and marks the link sponsored is doing the thing Google explicitly says is fine. A directory that requires a reciprocal link and gives you no way to qualify it is in the third bullet.

So how much is a directory link worth?

Less than people hope, and the reason has nothing to do with the attribute.

A link's value to a search engine has always depended on whether it looks like an editorial judgement. A directory where anyone can add themselves by filling in a form is, structurally, not an editorial judgement — and search engines have had two decades to work that out. Whether the link carries nofollow is a detail on top of that.

The mass-submission services — "we'll submit you to 100 directories" — are a clean illustration. Even if every one of those links were followed, you would have a hundred links that all appeared in the same week, from sites that link to everything, pointing at a domain with no other signals. That pattern is not subtle.

What a directory link is actually good for

This is the part the dofollow argument crowds out. A directory listing is worth having for reasons that have nothing to do with PageRank:

Referral traffic. People do browse directories. A listing that ranks for "best AI transcription tool" sends clicks whether or not the link is followed, and those clicks are worth more than a link, because they are people.

Ranking for your own brand plus a modifier. Someone searching "[your product] alternatives" or "[your product] pricing" will often hit a directory page before yours. Being listed with accurate copy means your own framing is on that page.

Being in the dataset. Directories get scraped, aggregated, and increasingly read by agents answering "what tools do X". A structured listing with correct categories and pricing is how you end up in an answer you did not write.

A crawl path to a new domain. For a site with no links at all, a handful of directory listings gets you discovered. This is real, and it is also a one-time benefit — the tenth directory does not repeat what the first one did.

How to evaluate a directory, then

Ignore the attribute for a moment and ask:

1. Does it rank for anything? Search a few of the category terms it targets. If none of its pages appear, it does not have traffic to send you.
2. Is it curated? Does someone review submissions, or does everything go live? Curation is the difference between a directory and a form.
3. Are the listings maintained? Click five entries. If two are dead links, the directory is abandoned and being in it does nothing.
4. Would a person find it useful? This is the one that correlates best with everything else.

Then, and only then, check the link attribute — as a tiebreaker, not a filter.

What we do here

We follow the links on published listings, and we say so plainly rather than making it a feature. A free launch requires our badge on your site; if you would rather not add it, there is a paid option that skips it. That is a reciprocal-link arrangement, which is why the choice is genuinely available rather than a condition of listing — the badge kit is one line of HTML, and the paid path exists precisely so nobody has to take it.

Every listing is reviewed by a person before it publishes. That is not a favour to you; it is the only thing that keeps the directory worth linking to from anywhere else.

If you want to see what gets through, the catalogue is public, and the submission page runs an audit on your URL before you fill in anything.