Dofollow and nofollow link checker
See which outbound links pass authority and which are marked.
Free and no signup. This one fetches the URL from our server; nothing about it is stored.
This one fetches the page from our server, so unlike the rest of these tools the URL does leave your browser. Nothing about it is stored.
About this tool
The practical use of this is checking a directory before paying it. Plenty of listing sites advertise a backlink and mark every outbound link nofollow, which is legitimate and worth knowing before the money moves. It is also how you check your own site is marking paid links correctly.
- Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, and prefers rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-submitted ones.
- Marking a paid link as followed is the version that carries real risk. Leaving an unpaid link followed carries none.
- Internal links are excluded, since nofollow on your own pages is almost always a mistake rather than a decision.
- Only links present in the served HTML are checked, which is also all a crawler sees on first fetch.
Questions
- What is the difference between nofollow, sponsored and ugc?
- sponsored marks paid or affiliate links, ugc marks user-generated content like comments, and nofollow is the general form. Google treats all three as hints and prefers the specific ones.
- Does a nofollow link have any value?
- Yes — referral traffic, and Google has said it treats the attribute as a hint. It is worth less than a followed link, not nothing.
- How do I check whether a directory gives a real backlink?
- Run one of its live listing pages through this. If every outbound link carries nofollow, the backlink they are advertising is a hint at most.