The pages selling dofollow guest posts tell you to demand a permanent followed link in writing. Google's spam policy names that exact deal, and none of those pages quotes it. Here it is in Google's own words, and what each option actually gets you.
You are looking at a guest post offer and the listing says dofollow. Maybe it says permanent dofollow guaranteed. You want to know whether that word is worth the price difference, or whether a nofollow placement at half the cost does the same job.
That is the dofollow vs nofollow guest post question, and it almost always gets answered as though one attribute is simply better than the other. It is really a question about what the extra money is paying for.
I read the pages currently ranking for this question before writing this. They split into two groups, and neither group answers it.
The pages that talk about guest posts tell you to insist on a followed link and get it confirmed in writing. Not one of them quotes Google's documentation. The pages that do quote Google's documentation never mention guest posts at all.
So here is the missing middle, checked against Google's live pages on 15 October 2026.
What do dofollow and nofollow actually mean?
Three words, and then the rest of this makes sense.
A dofollow link is just an ordinary link. Nothing has been added to it. It can pass ranking credit to the page it points at, which is the thing people are paying for.
A nofollow link is the same link with a small tag added in the page's code, written as rel="nofollow". The reader never sees it. It is a note to Google saying not to pass that credit.
rel="sponsored" is the tag Google asks sites to use when a link was paid for. It does the same job as nofollow and gives the reason.
One thing worth knowing, because almost nobody says it. Dofollow is not a tag anybody writes. There is no rel="dofollow". Dofollow just means none of the tags above are there. So when a seller promises you a dofollow link, they are promising to leave something out, not to add something in.
The tag is only half the question. The other half is whether the link was worth having at all, which comes down to the site it sits on and who put it there. I went through that separately in what makes a backlink high quality, using Google's own wording throughout.
What the pages selling dofollow guest posts tell you to do
I checked three of them, all published or updated within the last year.
One tells buyers to confirm a permanent dofollow link in writing before paying, and to ask the agency for a link attribute report. Another promotes guaranteed dofollow links through its own service. A third warns that some publishers quietly add rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" without disclosing it upfront, and tells you to verify the link is followed on a live article before you pay.
All of that is useful advice. It is also a description of the exact deal Google's spam policy names, and none of the three pages says so.
What Google's policy actually says
This is from Google's spam policies for Google web search, under link spam. I am quoting rather than summarising, because the summaries are where this gets lost.
Under the heading for buying or selling links for ranking purposes, the list includes:
"Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links"
And further down the same list:
"Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites."
Read the end of that sentence again. Guest posts are named. Not implied, not covered by a general principle. Named, alongside advertorials and press releases.
Two phrases in there are worth translating. A link that "passes ranking credit" is an ordinary followed link, the kind the dofollow listings are selling. An "optimized" anchor is one chosen for the search phrase rather than for the reader.
Now the part that almost never gets quoted alongside it. The same page says this arrangement is fine as long as the links are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value on the <a> tag.
That is the whole rule, in two pieces. Paying for a placement is not the problem. Paying for a placement whose link passes ranking credit is.
Paid placements are only one of eleven examples Google lists in that same policy. The other ten catch people who never bought a link in their life, from widget code to footer credits. All eleven are quoted and explained in what Google counts as a link scheme.
So what is a dofollow guest post, in plain terms?
A paid placement where the link has not been labelled.
That is not an accusation and it is not a reason to panic. It is just what the arrangement is, said plainly. The seller is charging you for a post, and the thing that makes it worth more than a nofollow post is specifically that the label Google asks for has been left off.
Once you see it in those terms, the sales language reads differently. Permanent dofollow guaranteed means the label will not be added later. We will confirm the attribute in writing means the same thing again. Neither is a technical feature. Both are promises about something being left off the page.
Then why does nearly every seller offer one?
Because hardly anybody uses the label, so leaving it off does not make a site stand out.
The best large scale count I can find is Ahrefs' study of link attributes across the top 110,000 sites by Ahrefs Rank. It found rel="sponsored" on 0.01 percent of referring domains and 0.008 percent of total backlinks. For comparison, plain nofollow appeared on 10.6 percent of all backlinks.
That study was published in May 2020, so treat the exact figures as old. I could not find a newer count of comparable size, and nothing I have seen since points the other way. The attribute Google created specifically for paid links is, in practice, almost unused.
So the whole market runs on a tag nobody uses. Sellers offer followed links because buyers ask for them. Buyers ask because every guide tells them to. And the one tag that would put the deal inside the rules sits at a fraction of one percent of the web.
That is the real situation, and it cuts both ways. Anyone who tells you buying dofollow links is risk free has not read the policy. Anyone who tells you it is certain disaster is overstating it, because the policy says what Google treats as spam, not what Google catches every time.
What does a nofollow link actually do, then?
Less than the listings imply, and more than nothing.
Google's documentation on qualifying your outbound links is specific about this:
"Links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed."
Generally, not never. The same page notes that a linked page may still be crawled, because it can be found other ways, such as through a sitemap or a link from another site.
So the honest position for planning is this. Assume a nofollow or sponsored link passes nothing to your rankings. Do not assume the placement itself does nothing, because the placement is a page that people read, that other people can quote, and that models reading the web can see.
Which is why counting nofollow links as zero in a report is as misleading as counting them as wins. They are not ranking assets and they are not waste. They are placements, and placements get judged on who read them.
If you want to know what each rel value means and how platforms apply them, I went through the exact attributes in are Medium links nofollow.
Dofollow vs nofollow guest post: what you are actually buying in each case
Here is the comparison the listings do not print.
With a nofollow or sponsored placement you are buying:
The audience of that publication on the day it runs. Your name on a domain people recognise. Referral clicks you can measure. A mention on a page that is indexed and readable. A relationship with an editor who may take your next piece.
With a dofollow placement you are buying all of the above, plus:
A link that passes ranking credit, for as long as it stays that way. The chance that the credit is reduced anyway, which nobody outside Google can measure. And a share in the deal Google's policy names, carried by your site as well as the publisher's.
Notice that everything in the first list is yours regardless of the attribute. Notice also that the second list is where the price difference goes. If you are buying guest post backlinks purely for ranking value, that second list is the whole purchase, and everything in the first list is value you are paying for and not using.
That is the decision. Not which attribute is better in the abstract, but whether the second list is worth the premium you are being quoted for it.
The three questions to ask before you pay
Is this placement paid, and will the link be labelled? Ask it as one question, because the two halves belong together. A seller who says the placement is paid and the link will carry sponsored is telling you the truth and following the documented rule. A seller who gets uncomfortable at the word paid is telling you something too.
Can I see three recent placements from this site, with URLs? Then open them and read the source. Not the guidelines page, the actual published pages. A guidelines page tells you what a site intends. A published page tells you what it did. I wrote the full check for a site in how to check a guest post site before you pay.
What anchor text will the link use, and who decides it? This can matter more than the attribute, and the policy explains why. That same sentence covers optimized anchor text on its own, separately from links that pass credit, so an exact match commercial anchor in a paid post is named whether the link is followed or not. There is more on that in what Google's policy says about guest post anchor text.
How to check the attribute yourself, in thirty seconds
Do not take anyone's word for this, including the seller's and including mine.
Open the published article in a browser on a computer. Press Ctrl+U to view the page source. Press Ctrl+F and type your own domain. Look at the <a tag that contains it. The rel value is written right there, and it is either present or it is not.
Run this before you buy, on the seller's recent examples, and again a few weeks after your own piece is published. The second check is the one that catches a link quietly changed after payment, which is a thing that happens often enough that three different sellers' own guides warn about it.
What this article does not tell you
It does not tell you what Google actually does with any individual paid followed link. Nobody outside Google can tell you that, and anyone who claims a measurement should be asked exactly what they measured.
It does not tell you that nofollow placements are a bargain. Some are overpriced too, and a placement on a site nobody reads is poor value at any attribute.
It does not cover what happens when a site is caught. The reports vary and most of them are one person's story, so I would rather say that plainly than fill the gap with confident guessing.
And it is a reading of a policy page as it stands on 15 October 2026. Google changes that page without announcing it. If you are reading this months from now, the two Google pages linked above are the ones to check, not my summary of them.
The short version
Google's spam policy names guest posts specifically, and the thing it names is a paid article containing a link that passes ranking credit or carries optimized anchor text. The same page says the arrangement is fine when the link is qualified with nofollow or sponsored.
So a dofollow guest post is a paid placement with the label left off, and that is what the price premium is for. A nofollow placement costs less and still gives you the audience, the byline, the referral traffic and the mention, which is most of what a good placement was ever worth. That is the dofollow vs nofollow guest post choice with the sales language removed.
Decide with that in front of you rather than with a listing that just says dofollow. If you want help choosing publications on that basis and getting placed in them, that is what I do at guest post campaigns.
Muhammad Kashif Khatri runs SEO26MASTER, builds Site Dossier, and is an editor at ILLUMINATION and four other Medium publications. He sells guest post campaigns, which is worth knowing while reading his opinion of what they are worth.
Sources quoted in this article
Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search
Google Search Central, Qualify your outbound links to Google
Ahrefs, The State of Nofollow, UGC and Sponsored Link Attributes, published May 2020
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