9 Common Misconceptions About Dofollow Links That Impact SEO Strategy
Many SEO professionals operate under outdated assumptions about dofollow links that can undermine their entire strategy. This article examines nine persistent myths and reveals what actually works, drawing on insights from seasoned experts who have tested these principles in real campaigns. Understanding these misconceptions will help you build a more effective, sustainable approach to link building and search visibility.
Treat Internal Signals As Primary
My biggest misconception was assuming dofollow value was meaningful only from external sites and that internal links were secondary. After auditing and correcting internal links—fixing 404s and redirect issues and ensuring key pages were linked from relevant high-authority pages—I learned internal dofollow links materially improve crawl efficiency and pass link equity to underperforming content. That shifted our strategy to prioritize a full crawl with tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, identify broken or orphaned pages, and map internal links to support priority pages before over-investing in external outreach. We now treat small internal linking fixes as foundational work that compounds over time alongside external link efforts.
Send A Tiny Media Kit
I used to assume securing dofollow links was mainly a numbers game and that persistent follow-ups would win the day. Over time I learned that most writers are simply busy, and a single copyable one-liner in the founder bio often gets used and linked, and those links were almost always dofollow. That insight changed our outreach: we now send a tiny media kit with tweet-sized blurbs, a quote graphic, and three headline ideas so journalists can publish with minimal work. This one tweak consistently boosted our dofollow link success and improved the quality of links we earned.
Convert Footer Credits To Nofollow
As a web designer and developer, I made the common practice of placing a link to my own website in the footer of my clients' websites. This seemed like a natural way to build backlinks at the time.
However, I came to realize that this was actually hurting my SEO. Because so many pages were linking to my website — and all pointing only to my homepage — search engines flagged this as an unnatural link profile. The sheer volume and repetition of the pattern was the problem, not any one link on its own.
This realization shifted how I approached link building entirely. I moved away from easy, high-volume tactics and toward fewer, more meaningful links. I also changed my footer links from dofollow to nofollow, which tells search engines not to pass SEO value through them — a much more appropriate practice for that type of credit link.
Audit And Disavow, Then Build Relevance
I've been doing SEO for the past 20 years, and for the first half of my career, I was mostly focussed on on-page meta data updates and on-going content creation with internal linking as my primary SEO strategy.
After taking a part-time role with a training company, who utilised their website as their primary lead generator, it was imperative to be in slots 1-3 on page one of the SERP's to assure on-going inbound leads for the sales team.
After 18 months of content production and on-page updates, we seemed to be stuck at slots 4-6 for many of our course pages. It was like we had reached a plateau and were stuck mid-page one.
My manager was a member of an entrepreneurs development organsation, so we had access to one of the biggest SEO agencies in our city via this organsation. We reached out and asked the owner of that SEO agency (who was also a member of this organsation) to conduct a site audit for the main website.
He came back to us with two takeaways:
1. We had a bunch of toxic backlinks pointing to the site
2. We had very few good backlinks pointing to the site
So, we immediately implemented a weekly backlink audit, to identify and disavow the toxic backlinks, while also implementing a backlink building strategy focussed primarily on industry-related directories, events listings and other white hat backlinking opportunities we could identify.
Within 2 months, we noticed an improvement in traffic across the entire site, with over 400 course pages impacted with improved rankings. It was quite a tangible change in a short amount of time and I learned two very important lessons:
1. Disavowing backlinks is an important on-going required task
2. Building industry-relevant backlinks is also an important on-going required task.
Now, when I work with any company who has been in business for 5+ years, the first thing I do is conduct a backlink audit, and create disavow files as required, while also implementing a backlink building strategy before I start the on-page or content updates!
Embrace Indirect Value From Citations
One of my biggest misconceptions early in my SEO career was believing that nofollow links had little to no value. Like many people, I focused almost entirely on dofollow links because of the idea of "link juice" and its direct impact on rankings. When I realized some of my hard-earned backlinks were nofollow, it felt like a wasted effort.
Over time, that perspective changed. I began to see nofollow links as part of a broader trust-and-visibility ecosystem. When a reputable site links to you with a nofollow attribute, it often reflects caution rather than a lack of value. They are still willing to reference your content, brand, or expertise, even if they are not formally endorsing it for ranking purposes.
In other words, if a site links to you but it's nofollow, they're saying, "Here is a resource worth sharing, even if we are not fully vouching for it." That is still a positive signal.
More importantly, I started to recognize the indirect benefits. Nofollow links can drive referral traffic, increase brand exposure, and lead to secondary opportunities that result in dofollow links. They also contribute to a more natural and diverse backlink profile, which aligns better with how search engines evaluate sites today.
This realization shifted my strategy away from chasing link attributes and toward building real visibility. Instead of filtering opportunities based on dofollow versus nofollow, I now focus on relevance, audience fit, and the overall marketing value of the placement. In the long run, that approach has been far more effective and sustainable.
Choose Context Above Quantity
I thought more dofollow links automatically meant better rankings. Simple math, right? Get 100 links, rank higher than someone with 50 links.
That thinking got me burned early on. I was placing links on any site that would take them, as long as they were dofollow. Domain authority 20 sites, irrelevant niches, sketchy neighborhoods. The links looked good in reports but did nothing for rankings.
The shift came when I started tracking which specific links actually moved the needle. I built a simple tracking system using Ahrefs API and Google Sheets to correlate link placements with ranking jumps. The pattern was clear: one link from a relevant, well-trafficked site in the right context beat ten random dofollow links every time.
Now at SERPpro, we turn down about 60% of potential publisher partnerships. Not because they won't sell dofollow links, but because they don't drive results. I'd rather place one link on a site that gets actual readers in your space than five links on generic blog networks.
The misconception cost me probably six months of spinning wheels in my early agency days. Quality became everything once I started measuring actual impact instead of just counting links. Context beats quantity. Every time.
Patrick Babakhanian is the founder of SERPpro, a white-label editorial placement and link building platform that has been serving SEO and digital PR agencies for over 12 years.
www.serppro.ai
Create Original Data That Attracts
Any person who engages in link building understands the pressure. Two years ago I took that road and I thought there was no other way but to purchase do-follow links. I gave all the strength to giant publishers and I was sincerely thinking that any real link equity was due to their domain power and not our own educational peptide guides. Retailing taught me that it is best to sell editors scraps rather than construct our own original data assets. Such a misconception is what makes you continue to pay the middleman rather than investing in your true value.
It turns out that I was absolutely mistaken in pursuing publishers. We have switched our whole strategy at PepThrive and began to release our own original industry survey results rather than requesting to be favored. I conducted a fast survey on the muscle repair patterns. That one study received more do-follow links within 60 days than we had received the year before of manual pitching. The synthesis of niche science information creates actual assets that allows the connections to be made naturally.
Favor Topical Fit Over Authority
Chris here -- I run Visionary Marketing, specialist SEO and Google Ads agency. I've been building links for clients for over a decade, so I've had plenty of time to be wrong about things.
My biggest misconception was that dofollow links from high-DA sites were always the most valuable. Early on, I'd chase DA 80+ dofollow placements and treat everything else as secondary. It seemed logical -- higher authority, followed link, more juice. Simple.
Then I tracked actual ranking impact across about 60 link placements over 6 months for a B2B client. The surprise: a dofollow link from a DA 38 niche industry blog moved the needle more than a dofollow from a DA 85 general news site. The industry blog sent referral traffic that converted, had topical relevance Google clearly weighted heavily, and the surrounding content was tightly related to our target keywords.
That changed our entire strategy. We stopped optimising for DA as the primary metric and started using what I call "topical proximity scoring" -- how closely does the linking page's content match the page we're building links to? A dofollow link from a topically irrelevant DA 90 site is worth less than one from a topically perfect DA 45 site. Our data has shown this consistently across about 15 client campaigns since.
The other realisation: a dofollow link that drives zero relevant traffic is just a number in a spreadsheet. The links that actually move rankings tend to also drive real visitors who engage with the page. Relevance first, DA second. That ordering matters more than most SEOs realise.
Measure Reality, Not Third-Party Scores
For a long time, I evaluated dofollow links the way most SEOs do — by DA and DR. High score means strong link, low score means skip it. That model collapsed pretty fast once I started tracking what actually moved rankings.
The first thing I had to unlearn: Ahrefs and Moz scores have nothing to do with how Google processes a link. The algorithm doesn't know what DR is. When we stopped filtering targets by third-party metrics and started scoring them on real organic traffic and topical relevance, the whole acquisition process changed. We were suddenly going after completely different sites.
The second dogma that broke was diminishing returns from the same domain. The textbook version says one strong link from a domain, then move on. That's true for average sites. It completely falls apart for tier-one platforms. Getting ten or twenty placements from a genuinely authoritative domain doesn't dilute — it compounds. Trust stacks, behavioral signals multiply. We shifted from obsessively scaling unique referring domains to deliberately clustering on a handful of apex sources.
The third one was the toxic link panic. The industry narrative is that cheap dofollow links are either ignored or punish you. What I observed in practice: an aggressive injection of low-quality links creates a short-term velocity spike that pushes pages to the top. You use that window to capture organic links from real traffic, then cut the artificial mass before the algorithmic correction hits. It's a disposable ignition mechanism, not a long-term asset.
And the dofollow/nofollow divide turned out to be mostly outdated. I used to ignore nofollow placements entirely. Now they're primary targets on high-trust publications — because LLMs and AI overviews use those citations to validate entity authority. The knowledge graph doesn't care about the rel attribute.
The anchor obsession also had to go. Heavy exact-match commercial anchors are a manipulation signal. Diversified anchors — branded, navigational, contextual — look organic because they are organic. That shift alone reduced filter exposure significantly.
