Backlinks From the Biggest Business Directories Are 100% Nofollow vs 2.8% From Blogs

A new bakery owner signs up for every free directory she can find and watches her backlink count climb into the hundreds. Months later her website still sits on page three for "bakery near me." Most of those links carry a small tag that tells Google not to count them as a vote for her website.

That tag is nofollow. A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and Google treats ordinary, followed backlinks as recommendations that help a page rank. A nofollow link asks Google not to pass that credit. Google now treats the tag as a hint rather than a strict rule, but a nofollow link is still worth far less for ranking than a followed one.

25.3% of backlinks to small business websites are nofollow, and on the average small business website the share is 31.3%. Where the links come from decides it. The biggest business directories send no followed links at all, while 97.2% of links from blogs are followed.

We picked 250 random websites from US small businesses listed on Google in 56 industries; 249 had backlink records. For each website we analysed up to 1,000 live backlinks from a licensed backlink index on September 23, 2026, 68,161 text and image links in all, and recorded whether each link was followed or nofollow, the tag it used, and the type of website it came from.

A link counts as nofollow if it carries any tag asking search engines not to pass credit: nofollow itself, ugc (user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts) or sponsored (paid links and ads). We measured the share of nofollow links across all links together, and for the average website, where each website counts once whether it has ten backlinks or a thousand.

Business directories are among the biggest single sources of links to small business websites, and three of the four largest are directories. Yellow Pages links to 81 of the 249 websites with 1,532 links, DexKnows to 67 with 985, Superpages to 63 with 971 and LocalityBiz to 65 with 842. Every one of those links is nofollow.

Directory listings still have a job. They send some visitors and they confirm a business's name, address and phone number, which matters for local search. They just do not pass ranking credit the way a followed link in an article does. A backlink count built mostly on directories looks bigger than it is.

The type of website a link comes from decides whether it passes credit. Links from blogs are nofollow 2.8% of the time and links from online stores 4.1%. News websites come in at 8.5% and general CMS websites at 11.6%. Organization websites, such as associations and nonprofits, are nofollow 26.7% of the time, and websites of unknown type 34.6%.

That split is the most useful finding for link building. A mention on a relevant blog is followed about 97 times in 100, while a listing on one of the big directories is never followed. For a small business with limited time, one good blog feature can be worth more for ranking than a dozen directory listings.

Across all 68,161 backlinks, 25.3% are nofollow. On the average small business website the share is 31.3%, with a median of 30.9%. The per-website figure is higher because a small website with a handful of links counts as much as a website with a thousand. Image links are nofollow slightly more often than text links, 28.4% against 24.9%.

Google's newer tags have barely caught on. Google introduced ugc and sponsored in 2019 so websites could say why a link is not endorsed, but 1.9% of backlinks use ugc and 0.7% use sponsored. Most websites that mark a link as not endorsed still use plain nofollow.

A quarter to a third of your backlinks being nofollow is normal for a small business website, and directory listings are a large part of the reason. Keep your listings accurate and consistent, since they help customers find you and support local search, but do not count them toward your link building.

When you build links, aim for the sources that are usually followed: local blogs, industry publications, supplier and partner websites, and local news coverage. Check the followed share of your own backlinks in any backlink tool, and judge progress by followed links from relevant websites, not by the total count.

Our link building services focus on exactly those sources: editorial mentions on blogs, publications and partner websites that pass real credit.

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