How to Check If a Backlink Is Dofollow or Nofollow (2026)

You submitted your startup to a directory, waited a week, and the listing is live. Congratulations — you have a link. Whether that link does anything for you is a completely separate question, and it is decided by a single HTML attribute you cannot see on the page.

Checking it takes about thirty seconds once you know where to look. This guide covers five ways to read that attribute, from a browser shortcut to a one-line terminal command, plus the two additional checks that decide whether a technically-dofollow link is worth anything at all. If you want the theory behind the attribute first, our guide to dofollow vs nofollow backlinks for startups explains what each value signals. This piece is purely about how to verify it yourself.

What you are actually looking for

Every link on a web page is an <a> tag. When that tag carries no rel restriction, it is what the SEO world calls a dofollow link, and search engines may count it as a signal toward the page it points at. There is no rel="dofollow" value in the HTML spec — dofollow is simply the absence of a restriction, which is why so many people misread it.

Three rel values change that. nofollow is the original signal, introduced in 2005 to fight comment spam. ugc marks user-generated content such as forum posts and profile links. sponsored marks paid or affiliate placements. Since 2019 Google treats all three as hints rather than strict directives, which means they may occasionally still be counted — but you should never plan on it. If you see any of the three, treat the link as worth having for referral traffic and brand presence, not as link equity.

So the practical question is narrow: does the tag pointing at your domain carry a rel value, and if so, which one?

Five ways to check a backlink

1. View the page source and search for your domain

This is the method that always works and never lies, because you are reading exactly what the server sent. Open the page that should be linking to you, press Ctrl+U (or Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to view source, then Ctrl+F and search for your domain name without the protocol — yourstartup.com rather than https://yourstartup.com, so you catch every variation.

You will land inside the anchor tag. Read the whole tag. If it looks like <a href="https://yourstartup.com"> with nothing else, or carries only target and rel="noopener", you have a dofollow link — noopener is a security attribute and has no SEO meaning whatsoever. If you see rel="nofollow", rel="ugc", or rel="nofollow noopener", you have your answer the other way.

2. Inspect the element in DevTools

Faster when you can see the link on the page. Right-click the link, choose Inspect, and the anchor tag opens in the elements panel with its attributes visible. One caveat that matters more every year: DevTools shows the rendered DOM, not the raw HTML. If a site injects or rewrites links with JavaScript, the two can differ. When something looks surprising, fall back to method one and compare.

3. Run it through a checker

Reading source works but does not scale past a handful of links, and it only answers one of the three questions that matter. Our free dofollow or nofollow link checker takes the page URL and your domain, finds every anchor on that page pointing at you, and reports the raw rel value, a plain-English verdict, and the anchor text used — alongside whether the hosting page is indexable at all. It is the same check as method one, run for you, on every matching link at once.

It also answers a question founders ask constantly and rarely get a straight response to: is there a link there at all? Plenty of directories accept a submission, show a confirmation screen, and quietly never publish anything.

4. One line in the terminal

If you are comfortable at a command line, this is the fastest option of all and it reads the raw HTML, so JavaScript cannot mislead you:

curl -sL "https://example.com/the-page" | grep -o '<a [^>]*yourstartup\.com[^>]*>'

That prints every opening anchor tag mentioning your domain, attributes and all. Two practical notes: add -A "Mozilla/5.0" if the site returns a 403, since a fair number of hosts block bare curl requests, and keep the -L flag so redirects are followed to the page that actually renders.

5. Browser extensions, with a caveat

Extensions that highlight nofollow links on a page are convenient for a quick visual scan of a directory or roundup. They are also the least reliable option here. Most were written before ugc and sponsored existed and colour those links as if they were dofollow. Use one for a first pass, then confirm anything that matters with method one, three, or four.

The two checks almost nobody runs

A dofollow link on a page search engines never index is worth exactly nothing, and this is where a lot of directory-submission effort silently disappears. Before you count a link, check two more things.

Is the hosting page noindex? Search the source for noindex — it can sit in a <meta name="robots"> tag, or arrive invisibly in an X-Robots-Tag response header, which is why this one gets missed. From the terminal, curl -sI "https://example.com/the-page" | grep -i x-robots-tag settles it in a second.

Is the URL blocked in robots.txt? Visit the host's /robots.txt and look for a Disallow rule covering the path your listing sits on. If crawlers are told not to fetch the page, they never see the link on it in the first place.

Between them, those two checks separate a real backlink from a listing that looks live and counts for nothing. They are the reason we built the checker to test all three signals rather than just the rel attribute.

What to do once you know

A dofollow link on an indexable, crawlable page is the outcome you want — record it, note the date, and re-check it in a few months, because links do get removed and attributes do get changed site-wide without warning. A nofollow link on a page with real traffic is still worth keeping for the visitors and the credibility; just do not count it toward your link-building targets.

A dofollow link on a noindex page is the one to walk away from. It costs the same effort as a good link and returns nothing, and if a directory does this across the board, every future submission there is wasted too.

If your audit turns up more decorative links than real ones, the fix is a better shortlist rather than more submissions. Start with the best startup directories to submit to and the free directories actually worth your time, then work through how to get backlinks for a new website for the non-directory routes. Run every placement through the checker afterwards — a surprising share of self-described "dofollow directories" are not.

Launchory sits on the right side of that line deliberately. Browse the directory, submit your startup, verify the badge on your own site, and your listing carries a dofollow link on an indexable page — then point the checker at it and confirm that for yourself rather than taking our word for it. Our pricing page spells out exactly what the free and premium tiers include.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check if a backlink is dofollow or nofollow?

Open the linking page's source, search for your domain, and read the rel attribute on the anchor tag. No rel, or only noopener, means dofollow. nofollow, ugc, or sponsored means the link is flagged not to pass ranking signals in the usual way.

Is there a rel="dofollow" attribute?

No. Dofollow is not a real HTML value — it is just the name people use for a link that carries no restriction. If you ever see rel="dofollow" in source, it is meaningless markup that search engines ignore, though the link itself is still unrestricted and therefore dofollow in practice.

Does rel="noopener" affect SEO?

No. noopener is a browser security attribute that stops a newly opened tab from accessing the page that opened it. It has no effect on how search engines treat the link, and it appears on plenty of perfectly good dofollow links.

Are nofollow links worthless?

No. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than an absolute rule, and a nofollow link on a page with real readers still sends traffic, builds brand recognition, and often leads to genuine dofollow coverage later. It simply should not be counted as link equity when you plan.

How often should I re-check my backlinks?

Once a quarter is enough for most early-stage sites, plus a check whenever you hear a site has been redesigned. Links get pruned during rebuilds and platforms sometimes switch entire link categories to nofollow or ugc in a single deploy without telling anyone.

Conclusion

Link building is measured in links that count, not links that exist. The gap between the two is one HTML attribute and two index checks — all three readable in under a minute per placement, with nothing more than your browser or a single curl command.

Build the habit of verifying every placement the day it goes live, and record the result somewhere you will look again. You will stop spending weeks chasing directories that hand out decorative links, and the shortlist you are left with will be genuinely worth working. Start with the link attribute checker on the last three places you submitted to — most founders are surprised by at least one of them.