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In practice
The binary is older than its current meaning: nofollow was introduced to fight comment spam, later extended to sponsored and UGC variants, and finally redefined as a “hint” — search engines may count nofollow links when evaluating a site, and in practice they do, especially from credible publications. What did not change: a genuinely placed link on a page your buyers read has value in readers, brand exposure and entity signals regardless of its rel attribute, and a manufactured dofollow link on a junk page has no value regardless of its attribute.
Chasing the attribute is therefore a category error, though a persistent one — marketplaces price “dofollow” at a premium, and vendors who guarantee the attribute are describing their plumbing, not their quality. Where the attribute does matter commercially: transparency and pattern. A profile that is 100% dofollow from hundreds of unrelated sites reads as bought, because organic profiles always accumulate some nofollow from major platforms, aggregators and news sites. That natural share is healthy, not wasted.
The decision points a buyer actually controls: whether the placement’s commercial nature is disclosed to the publisher (some will add sponsored labels, some will not — a risk decision, not an SEO trick), and whether the publisher’s normal linking practice matches what was negotiated. In qualification, the check is simpler: look at what the publisher’s outbound links look like in practice — attributes, contexts, frequency — because that is what your placement will inherit.
See also: Nofollow, UGC and sponsored link attributes, Buying links, Paid placements disclosure and labels.
Related service: Link building strategy.
