How to Check if a Link Is Dofollow or Nofollow

Four methods, from a five-second right-click to auditing thousands of backlinks at once. You only need the first one most days.

1. Browser inspect (fastest)

1. Right-click directly on the link text.
2. Choose Inspect (Chrome, Edge, Brave) or Inspect Element (Firefox, Safari with developer tools enabled).
3. The developer panel opens with the anchor tag highlighted.
4. Read the rel attribute.

<a href="https://yoursite.com" rel="nofollow">Your Brand</a>   → nofollow
<a href="https://yoursite.com">Your Brand</a>                    → dofollow

This method is authoritative because it reads the rendered DOM — including links a script injected after page load, which source view can miss.

2. View page source

Press Ctrl+U (Windows) or Cmd+Option+U (Mac), then use Ctrl+F / Cmd+F to search for your domain. Read the surrounding anchor tag. Useful when you want to scan every mention of your domain on a page at once.

Also search the source for <meta name="robots". A page-level content="nofollow" makes every link on the page nofollow even when individual tags look clean. This is the single most common false positive.

3. Browser extensions

If you check links all day, an extension saves the right-click. Popular free options include NoFollow, SEO Minion, Detailed SEO Extension and Link Redirect Trace. They outline nofollow links on the page or list every outbound link with its rel value.

Extensions read the same DOM you would, so they are as accurate as inspect — just faster. Do check they are current, since a stale extension can miss sponsored and ugc.

4. Bulk checking a whole profile

To answer "what share of my backlinks are followed?" you need a crawler or backlink index, not manual checks:

• Backlink tools. Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz all expose a dofollow/nofollow filter on the referring pages report, plus a profile-level percentage.
• Google Search Console. Free, and shows who links to you — but it does not break links down by rel value, so pair it with something else.
• Screaming Frog. Crawl a list of URLs and read the outlinks report, which includes the rel attribute for every link found. Best when you are auditing a specific set of placements.

Our roundup of the best link building tools compares these on price and data coverage. Once you have the numbers, interpret them against the ratios in what a good backlink profile looks like.

Gotchas that fool people

• Page-level meta robots. As above — it overrides everything, silently.
• Redirect wrappers. Many sites route outbound links through a tracker (/out?url=). The visible link may look followed while the hop kills any value.
• Sponsored and UGC. Neither says "nofollow", but both are non-endorsing. Check for all three values — see the attributes guide.
• Logged-out vs logged-in views. Some communities show followed links to members and nofollow to everyone else, or vice versa. Check as a signed-out visitor, since that is what a crawler sees.
• JavaScript links. An onclick handler with no href is not a link at all, regardless of what it looks like.

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