The Core Difference
In HTML, a normal hyperlink looks like this:
<a href="https://yourapp.com">Your App</a>SEOs call this a dofollow link, although there is no "dofollow" attribute: it's simply a link without a qualifying rel value. Google can follow it and use it as a signal about the page it points to.
A site can qualify a link by adding a rel attribute. Google supports three values:
rel="nofollow": the site doesn't want to vouch for the link.rel="ugc": the link is in user-generated content such as comments or forum posts.rel="sponsored": the link is an ad or paid placement.
<a href="https://yourapp.com" rel="nofollow">Your App</a>Since Google's 2019 change to nofollow, all three are treated as hints rather than strict commands: for ranking from September 2019, and for crawling and indexing from 1 March 2020. Google may still use a qualified link, but you shouldn't count on it.
How Links Help a New Site
Links are one of the ways Google discovers pages and judges how important they are, but they're far from the only signal. Relevance, content quality and how well a page answers the search all matter too.
You'll often hear that a new site has a "Domain Authority of 0". Domain Authority is a metric made by Moz, a third-party estimate of how likely a site is to rank. Google doesn't use it. What's true is that a new domain has few links, few mentions and little history for Google to work with, which is why new sites usually take time to rank for competitive searches.
A handful of relevant links from real sites in your field does more for a new domain than hundreds of links from pages nobody reads.
Why Big Platforms Qualify Their Links
Many large sites built on user-generated content, such as social networks and forums, mark outbound links with nofollow or ugc, or send them through redirects. It discourages people from posting spam just to get links.
That doesn't make those platforms useless for SEO. A post on a busy community can send visitors who sign up, write about you and link to you from their own sites. Judge a channel by the people it sends, not only by its link attribute.
Directories and launch boards that review submissions by hand can afford to give followed links, because the review keeps spam out. Hauntboard gives every approved listing a dofollow link: paid listings keep it permanently, and a free listing keeps it as long as the Hauntboard badge stays on its site. If the badge is removed, that listing's link switches to nofollow.
Building a Natural Backlink Profile
Don't buy backlink packages. Google's spam policies treat buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, and paid placements are expected to carry rel="sponsored".
Instead, earn links in ways that also bring visitors:
- Reviewed launch boards and directories: sites that check submissions by hand. Our list of places to launch your startup is a starting point.
- Founder stories and interviews: answer Q&As on maker blogs and podcasts in your niche.
- Free tools: calculators, checklists and templates that people link to as resources, like our MRR calculator or launch checklist.
- Honest data posts: publish your real numbers and what you learned from your launch.