🔎Are press releases nofollow or dofollow? A market analysis

Every SEO who runs a press release campaign asks the same first question: are the links dofollow or nofollow? The answer depends entirely on which outlet the release lands on — and the market has shifted dramatically over the last five years, mostly in one direction.

We audited link attribution on ten of the outlets most commonly quoted by press release vendors. Here's what we found.

Methodology

We looked at 200+ syndicated press releases published between January and October 2025 across ten major outlets. For each, we inspected the outbound link HTML on the release page (right-click → Inspect → look at the rel attribute). Where a site had multiple content zones, we distinguished between them.

The headline answer

Of the top 10 outlets we checked, nine use nofollow or sponsored on all press release outbound links. The tenth has an inconsistent policy that appears to depend on the section the content lives in.

Outlet by outlet

Why almost every big outlet went nofollow

Three pressures converged between 2013 and 2024:

• →Google's 2013 guidance. Matt Cutts explicitly said press release links should be nofollowed like ads. Publishers took the hint quickly.
• →Manual actions against news sites. Google issued several unpublicized penalties to publishers whose "news" sections were flooded with cheap sponsored placements. Nofollow became a legal-department-approved insurance policy.
• →The 2024 site reputation abuse update. Google's November 2024 policy clarification made it clear that host sites publishing third-party content for ranking manipulation risk being deindexed for those sections. Several major news domains removed their sponsored content silos entirely in the months following.

Where dofollow press release placements still live

The dofollow supply hasn't disappeared — it just moved. The publishers that still keep sponsored content dofollow tend to fall into three categories:

• →Mid-tier news domains (DR 40-75) that treat sponsored articles as normal editorial content, integrated into their main site rather than walled off in a "paid content" section.
• →Niche trade publications where the audience is small enough that Google's site reputation abuse policy hasn't targeted them.
• →Regional and local news networks that use press releases to fill content quotas and don't apply blanket nofollow policies.

Curating this list is most of the work. This is the network we've built out at DoFollow Press Release — a few hundred publishers where the dofollow attribution is contractually locked in, not left to chance.

How to check any placement yourself

Ten-second sanity check on any live press release placement:

Option 1 — inspect the HTML:

• →Open the article in Chrome.
• →Right-click your link → Inspect.
• →Look at the <a> tag. If you see rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored", it's not passing equity.
• →If there's no rel attribute (or it just says rel="noopener"), it's dofollow.

Option 2 — use a free checker. If you'd rather skip the DevTools dance, paste the article URL into a free dofollow link checker and it will list every outbound link with its attribution in a second or two. Handy for auditing dozens of placements in a row.

Bottom line

Assume nofollow unless you can prove otherwise. If you're paying for "SEO benefit," make dofollow attribution contractual, not implied. And check the live placement after publication — publishers occasionally change policies, and vendors occasionally overpromise.