5 Tips for Balancing Dofollow and Nofollow Links in Your SEO Strategy
Building a balanced link profile requires strategic thinking about both dofollow and nofollow links, but many SEO professionals struggle to find the right approach. This article breaks down five practical methods to help optimize link distribution, backed by insights from experienced SEO experts. These actionable tips focus on quality, timing, audience behavior, and diversification to strengthen overall search performance.
Favor Quality Over Ratios
I balance dofollow link pursuit with building a natural mix by prioritizing relevance and quality over any fixed percentage. In practice we filled business directory profiles and prioritized contextual dofollow opportunities from industry sites and HARO while accepting reputable nofollow links from directories and press. I did not track a strict numeric ratio; instead we used competitor backlink audits to guide where to focus outreach. That approach produced noticeable increases in referral traffic and a handful of leads without chasing an arbitrary dofollow-to-nofollow target.
Map Attention Shifts Across Time
We have found that a steady mix of dofollow and nofollow links over time works best. It is not based on any trick but reflects how people interact online. Most people share content first before others start citing it. This pattern helps us understand how attention builds and shifts. We track this pattern in groups over time to see how pages grow.
New pages often have more nofollow links because they are still being discussed. Older pages gain more dofollow links as they become trusted sources. If a page stays with mostly nofollow links, it shows the value is not clear enough. If it shifts to only dofollow links, it may mean outreach is too heavy.
Adopt a 65 to 35 Split
I am an SEO Strategist, and I have learned that balancing different types of links is the only way to grow a website safely. When building a fitness app in Sweden, I grew our traffic from 10,000 to 500,000 monthly visitors by making our link profile look natural to search engines. In my experience, a 65:35 ratio works best. This means 65% of your links should pass direct authority, while the other 35% are "no-follow" links that come from forums, social media, or review sites. If you only have one type of link, Google will flag your site as suspicious.
My strategy is very clear. I focus 65% of my effort on high quality news sites and tech podcasts for authority. I keep the other 35% on popular community forums like Reddit and local Swedish message boards to show that real people were talking about us. I use diverse linking to make sure our links look varied. About 45% used our brand name, 25% were just our website address, and 30% used specific keywords like "best fitness app." The prioritization of Swedish websites with a domain rating of 40 or higher is done. This helps us mimic the success of big local companies like Spotify.
The implementation of these grew our traffic by 220% in eight months. We hit a top-three ranking for our most important search terms without ever getting penalized.
Prioritize Intent With Source Diversity
In practice, I don't approach link building with a fixed dofollow versus nofollow ratio in mind, because search engines don't evaluate profiles based on an ideal percentage, they evaluate how natural and contextually credible the link profile looks over time. What we focus on instead is acquisition intent and source diversity. Dofollow links still carry the primary weight for ranking, so they remain a core objective, especially from high-authority, relevant domains through placements like editorial mentions, niche edits, and digital PR. However, an over-concentrated dofollow profile can look manipulated, particularly if those links are coming from similar types of sites or anchors. That's where nofollow links play an important role, not necessarily for direct ranking impact, but for building a realistic footprint and often driving qualified referral traffic. In many cases, strong nofollow links from platforms like major publications, forums, or social channels can indirectly contribute to SEO performance by increasing visibility, brand searches, and even attracting organic dofollow links over time. In terms of what has worked best, most of the healthy link profiles I've seen tend to land somewhere in the range of roughly 60 to 80 percent dofollow, with the remainder being nofollow, but this is more an observation than a target. The real priority is ensuring that links are earned from a mix of sources, have varied anchor text, and align with the site's topical relevance and growth stage. If a link profile looks like something that could realistically happen without deliberate manipulation, that is usually when it performs best.
Chase Variety Where Your Audience Lives
Hi,
Chris here. I run Visionary Marketing, specialist SEO and Google Ads agency in the UK. We've built link profiles for clients across dozens of niches so I've got a pretty firm view on this one.
The short answer is that anyone obsessing over a specific dofollow-to-nofollow ratio is overthinking it. I've seen that advice floating around — "aim for 60/40" or "70/30 dofollow to nofollow" — and it's mostly nonsense. Google's algorithm isn't sitting there with a calculator checking your ratio. What it's looking for is whether your link profile looks like it happened naturally, and natural link profiles are messy.
That said, here's what we've actually observed. We audited the backlink profiles of 34 sites ranking in the top 3 for competitive UK commercial keywords last year. The dofollow-to-nofollow split ranged from about 55/45 to 85/15. There was no magic number. The sites that ranked well had one thing in common: variety. Different anchor texts, links from different types of sites, a mix of follow and nofollow, and they accumulated gradually over time rather than in suspicious bursts.
Where nofollow links genuinely matter is in two places most people miss. First, brand signals. A nofollow mention on a major news site or industry publication still tells Google your brand exists and people are talking about it. We had a client get a nofollow link from the BBC and saw their branded search volume increase 23% in the following month. You can't buy that with a dofollow guest post on some random blog.
Second, referral traffic. One of our e-commerce clients gets more actual revenue from a nofollow link on a popular forum than from 15 dofollow links on low-traffic directories combined. The link doesn't pass PageRank but it passes customers, which is sort of the whole point.
The real danger isn't having too many nofollow links. It's having too many dofollow links from obviously manufactured sources. If 90% of your profile is dofollow links from guest posts with exact-match anchors, that's a pattern Google can spot a mile away. We cleaned up a profile like that for a client in 2024. Took about 4 months of disavows and genuine link building to recover, and they'd lost roughly £8,000 in revenue during that period.
My advice: stop chasing a ratio. Focus on earning links from sites where your actual audience hangs out. If some are nofollow, good.
Chris
Visionary Marketing
chris@visionary-marketing.co.uk
visionary-marketing.co.uk
