A dofollow link passes ranking signals (link equity) to the destination — it is the default behaviour for any link with no special rel value. A nofollow link carries rel="nofollow", which tells search engines not to pass authority and, historically, not to follow it for crawling. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint rather than a strict directive, but it still meaningfully shapes how link equity flows across the web.

It reads the rel attribute on every <a> tag. If the rel value contains the token "nofollow" (case-insensitive), the link is classified as nofollow. Everything else — including links with no rel attribute at all — is classified as dofollow. It also surfaces the related crawl-control tokens "sponsored" and "ugc" so you can see how paid and user-generated links are tagged.

A link is internal when its resolved hostname matches the hostname of the page you analyzed, and external when it points to any other domain. Relative URLs (like /about) are resolved against the page URL first, so they correctly count as internal. Anchors (#section), mailto:, tel:, and javascript: links are excluded because they are not crawlable navigation links.

Almost always yes. Nofollowing your own internal links wastes the link equity you could be passing between your pages and can leave important pages under-crawled. The tool flags nofollow internal links specifically because they are usually a mistake — a leftover from a plugin, a templated rel value, or copy-pasted markup.

Use rel="nofollow" (or rel="sponsored") on paid links, affiliate links, and any link you do not editorially endorse. Use rel="ugc" for links inside user-generated content like comments and forum posts. For login, register, and other utility links you do not want crawled or indexed, nofollow is also reasonable. Never blanket-nofollow your normal navigation or footer links.

The tool fetches the server-rendered HTML, so links injected later by JavaScript will not appear. It also de-duplicates by resolved URL, so the same destination linked five times counts once in the unique total (the raw total still reflects every tag). Anchors, mailto, tel, and javascript links are intentionally excluded from the navigation counts.

Not directly. nofollow controls link-equity flow and is a crawling hint; it does not add a page to or remove it from the index. To control indexing you use a robots meta tag (noindex) or an X-Robots-Tag header. A common mistake is assuming nofollow on a link will keep the target page out of Google — it will not if the page is linked or submitted elsewhere.