3. Aura++: Launch your project and increase online aura Our own backlink spreadsheet was wrong about which directory links were dofollow

A small mistake was discovered in the dofollow link checker of Aura++. The system had a spreadsheet listing directories and launch sites where the company's products were listed, with a column indicating whether the links were dofollow or nofollow. The reporter assumed this column was accurate, but upon running it through the dofollow link checker shipped with Aura++, the spreadsheet turned out to be incorrect in some ways that were unexpected.

Three real listings were examined: SaaSHub, PeerPush, and BetaList. On SaaSHub, there were three links to Aura++ on one page. The main "Visit website" link was found to be dofollow, while the "Official pricing" and "Blog" links were nofollow. However, the spreadsheet had incorrectly marked SaaSHub as nofollow.

PeerPush had a single link, but it only included the rel= "noopener" attribute, which is a security measure for new tabs and has no SEO impact. Therefore, this link was also determined to be dofollow. BetaList, the listing for the SideHunt listing, did not have any direct links to sidehunt.io in the server HTML. The buttons redirected to BetaList's own domain, resulting in no direct link to the site, either dofollow or nofollow.

The key takeaway for the reporter was that the question "Is this directory dofollow?" is not the correct one to ask. Instead, one page can contain both dofollow and nofollow links, and some buttons that appear to be links may not actually point to the website. The reporter learned a few things while building the link checker: there is no "rel=dofollow" attribute; a link is considered dofollow if it does not contain "nofollow," "UGC," or "sponsored" attributes; Google treats these three as hints rather than hard rules since 2019, so nofollow links are not always worthless; the reporter should check server HTML rather than what is shown in the developer tools after scripts run, as the server HTML is closer to what a crawler sees first; and when checking your own listings, use the free dofollow link checker, which takes a page URL and your domain to list all links pointing to you with their rel values and anchor text without requiring any signup.

This tool counts both www and subdomains as your site. The checker only reads server HTML, so links added later through JavaScript won't be detected, which is a limitation. Lastly, if you're still unsure about the value of directory links, the reporter recommends an explainer on how Domain Rating (DR) affects small startups, as Domain Rating is often the metric people rely on.