LaunchRepoDefinition
rel="nofollow" is an attribute on an anchor telling search engines the linking site does not vouch for the target. Google added rel="ugc" (user-generated content) and rel="sponsored" and, since 2019, treats all three as hints rather than directives. “Dofollow” is not an attribute at all — it is shorthand for a normal link without those tokens.
Page-level signals also apply: a meta robots nofollow, an X-Robots-Tag or a redirect through a tracking route can change what a crawler sees regardless of the anchor.
Sources: Google Search Central: Qualify your outbound links · Google Search Central Blog: Evolving “nofollow” (2019)
Example
You look at three public sample listings on one directory. Two product links carry rel="ugc nofollow", and one paid spot carries rel="sponsored". All three are hints, so you record “qualified” for each — whatever the directory’s sales page says about dofollow links.
On a second directory the anchors carry no rel token, but the page has <meta name="robots" content="nofollow">. The page-level rule covers every link on it, so the anchor alone would have misled you. The snippet below shows the variants side by side.
<a href="https://yourproduct.example/">…</a> <!-- no token: "dofollow" -->
<a href="https://yourproduct.example/" rel="nofollow">…</a> <!-- hint: not vouched for -->
<a href="https://yourproduct.example/" rel="ugc">…</a> <!-- hint: user-generated -->
<a href="https://yourproduct.example/" rel="sponsored">…</a> <!-- hint: paid placement -->
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> <!-- page level: all links -->Why it matters for a directory launch
Directory marketing lives on the word dofollow. It is checkable on one page and unknowable for a whole site, and the hint status means even a clean anchor is not a guarantee of anything. Knowing what the tokens are lets you read a listing page yourself instead of trusting a sales claim — including ours.
How LaunchRepo handles it
The priority method records the element, href, rel tokens and final destination of the product link on three public sample listings per directory; the inspect-listing.js snippet lists candidate anchors in the browser console. “Crawlable” means a resolving anchor without nofollow, ugc or sponsored; “qualified” means those hints apply. LaunchRepo never labels a directory dofollow on its own pages, and the best-of lists carry no link claims.
Go deeper
Directory backlinks: what we can prove
How to record element, href, rel tokens and final destination on sample listings, and why a clean anchor is still not a promise.
See the term in the repository
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