A followed link is an outbound link that carries none of the three markers search engines ask for on links you do not vouch for: nofollow, sponsored and ugc. With none of them, the link can pass some of your page’s standing to the site it points at. It is the ordinary state of a link, and most links are meant to be followed.
Why it matters
A followed link to a good site is a recommendation. A followed link to a parked page, a domain nobody owns or a hidden spam target gives away standing for nothing, or worse. Whether a link is followed therefore changes what a finding means, though it never changes whether visitors can still land there.
How Link Signals treats it
Three states are kept apart on every link, and they are never merged.
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Followed | The page was read and the link carries no marker |
| Marked | The link carries nofollow, sponsored or ugc, shown by the strongest of them |
| Not recorded | How it was marked was never saved, as on a scan from before this was tracked |
- A page that has a robots meta tag with nofollow makes every link on it nofollow.
- When the same destination is linked more than once on a site, it counts as followed if any one of those links has no marker.
- A link whose marker was never recorded is not reported as followed, so an older report says nothing rather than something untrue.
- The advice on a flagged link depends on it: a followed link is told to be removed or marked, and an already marked one is noted as passing no credit.
Common misunderstandings
- Followed does not mean bad. It only means nothing stops the link passing credit.
- A marker is a hint to search engines and does not make a bad destination safe for the people who click.
- Followed here is about links on your pages. It says nothing about links that point at you.
Questions
Which links should be marked?
Links you were paid for, links written by visitors, and links you cannot vouch for. Which rel should a link have goes through each case.
Where do followed links show in a report?
In the comparison as links followed with no marker, and in the ranking credit panel as the total that flagged links are measured against.
Run a scan and find where these show up on your own site.
