Most explanations of this topic are several years out of date, and the outdated version leads people to waste effort. Here is where it actually stands.

There is no such thing as a "dofollow" link

This is the first thing to get straight. rel="dofollow" is not a real attribute and never has been. It is a word the SEO community invented to describe the absence of rel="nofollow". A normal link, with no rel attribute at all, is what people mean when they say dofollow. If you see a plugin or a service offering to make your links "dofollow", it is offering to do nothing.

What changed in 2019, and why it matters

Google introduced rel="nofollow" in 2005 to fight comment spam. For fourteen years it worked as a directive: a nofollowed link was dropped entirely, and no ranking signal passed through it.

In September 2019 Google changed two things at once. It added two new values, rel="sponsored" for paid or affiliate links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content such as comments and forum posts. And it downgraded all three from directives to hints, meaning Google decides case by case whether to take the signal into account rather than always discarding it.

The practical consequences are worth spelling out, because a lot of advice still assumes the old model:

• A nofollowed link is no longer guaranteed to be worthless to the recipient. It may or may not count.
• Equally, it is not guaranteed to be worth anything. Anyone selling you nofollowed links on the basis that "Google counts them now" is overstating a hint.
• The attributes are not mutually exclusive. rel="sponsored nofollow" is valid and is a reasonable belt-and-braces choice on paid placements.

Which attribute to use on your own outbound links

This is the part you actually control, and the rules are simple.

Use sponsored on anything you were paid for: affiliate links, paid reviews, sponsored posts, advertising. This is not optional advice. Undisclosed paid links are a link scheme under Google's spam policies, and the penalty falls on the site doing the selling as well as the one buying.

Use ugc on links inside anything your visitors wrote: comments, profile fields, forum posts, reviews. Most content management systems can do this automatically.

Use nothing on ordinary editorial links to sources you are citing because they are useful. Linking out to good sources is normal, and the idea that it "leaks" something you need to hoard has no basis. Sites that refuse to link out do not rank better for it; they are just less useful.

Use nofollow where you want to reference something without vouching for it, which in practice means linking to a site you are criticising, or to a source you have not verified.

The "link juice" model is the wrong mental picture

A lot of confusion comes from imagining a fixed quantity of authority that gets divided among the links on a page, so that every extra link dilutes the others. That model came from a simplified reading of the original PageRank paper and has not described how search engines work for a very long time.

A more useful picture: links are one of many signals, their value depends enormously on context and on the linking site, and a single link from a genuinely relevant page can be worth more than hundreds of low-quality ones. Counting links is close to meaningless.

What this means for a small site

If you are running a modest website, the entire practical takeaway is three lines long. Mark paid links as sponsored. Mark comment links as ugc. Link out normally to things worth reading, and stop worrying about it.

The time people spend auditing outbound link attributes is almost always better spent on the pages themselves. A link attribute has never been the reason a good page failed to rank.