Dofollow or nofollow: what links you really get from USA Today, Yahoo Finance and AP News

“Is it dofollow?” is the first question most buyers ask about a placement and the one sellers answer least reliably. So we stopped asking and looked. This article records what the page source of each outlet actually says, explains what the attributes mean in Google's own words, and shows how to check any page yourself in a minute. The outlets are the ones in our directory; where our own listing disagrees with what we found, we have corrected the listing.

What the attributes mean

A link can carry one of three values Google reads. Its guidance for site owners says to mark links that are advertisements or paid placements with rel="sponsored", user-submitted links with rel="ugc", and to use rel="nofollow" when the other values do not apply; links with any of these “will generally not be followed”. A link with no attribute, the one sellers call dofollow, is an ordinary link that can pass ranking credit.

Two dates matter. In September 2019 Google announced that all three values would be treated as hints rather than directives for ranking, and as hints for crawling and indexing from 1 March 2020. And in its spam policies, updated 28 August 2026, Google lists “advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit” and links “with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites” as link spam, unless they are qualified with nofollow or sponsored. Put the two together and the outlets' behaviour makes sense: a publisher that takes money for a page and leaves the link plain is breaking Google's rules, and the big ones stopped doing it years ago.

What the pages actually say

Each row is one live page, opened in a browser on 23 October 2026, with the robots meta tag, the canonical tag and the rel attribute on the links to the advertiser or company recorded as found. One page per outlet is a sample, not a census; sections change, so check the current sample on each listing before you order.

Three things stand out. Not one of the eight national outlets leaves a press-release link plain and permanent. Two of the names that sell best, AP News and Benzinga, keep the page out of Google entirely, so they cannot rank for anything. And the one outlet with plain links, Morningstar, expires the page after roughly 90 days. A seller who lists any of these as “dofollow, permanent” has not looked.

Does a nofollow link do anything?

Google's position is the 2019 hint model and nothing more specific. Gary Illyes said at the time that “it is up to the ranking teams to decide how they want to use nofollows”; John Mueller has reminded people that sponsored is also nofollow. On press releases specifically, Google has been consistent for a decade: Matt Cutts in 2012 said he “wouldn't expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings”, and Mueller said in 2021 that Google “probably tries to recognize press releases” and otherwise treats them as content. We found no controlled study since 2020 that measures a ranking effect from nofollow links, and Ahrefs' last large count put nofollow at 10.6% of all backlinks to the top 110,000 sites, which says only that they are common.

Unlinked mentions are weaker still: Mueller has said Google does not treat them as links and no signal passes. So if the question is “will this link raise my site's rankings”, the honest answer for every outlet in the table is: do not count on it. The broader question, what a press release does for search, is answered in do press releases help SEO?

What you are actually buying

If the link is not the asset, four other things are, and they depend on the page being indexable:

1. A page that ranks for your name. An indexable press-release page on usatoday.com or finance.yahoo.com appears for “[brand]” and “[brand] reviews” within days, on a domain the searcher trusts. Nothing in the rel attribute changes that. This is why the table's “indexable” column matters more than its “links” column: the AP News and Benzinga pages can never do this.
2. Readers who click. A nofollow link is still a link. Traffic from a wire copy usually arrives with the wire's tracker domain as the referrer rather than the outlet's, so look for it under GlobeNewswire or PR Newswire in your analytics, not only under Yahoo.
3. A source for AI assistants. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and OpenAI's search crawler needs to be able to read the page. Noindexed copies are invisible to both. How assistants use the pages they can read is covered in how press releases get brands cited by AI.
4. A record. A dated, labelled page on a known domain that says who you are, which you can link to from your own site. That is what the AP News copy is good for, and it is worth something; it is just not worth paying a dofollow premium for.

How to check any page in a minute

1. Open a live sample from the outlet, published in the last month. Not a screenshot and not a PDF.
2. Right-click the link to the advertiser and choose Inspect, or press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) to view the source and search for the advertiser's domain. Read the rel attribute on the <a> tag. Note whether the href is the advertiser's URL or a tracker redirect.
3. In the source, search for "robots". A noindex value means the page will not appear in Google, whatever the links say. Search for "unavailable_after" too; it is an expiry date.
4. Search for "canonical". If it points to another domain or another URL, that is the page Google will keep, and your page may never show.
5. Search Google for the exact headline in quotes. An indexable page from a week ago should be there; the method for pages that are not is in the indexing guide.

The last step is the one that catches sellers. Our guide is my press release indexed? walks through it without Search Console access.

What to ask a seller instead of “is it dofollow?”

• Is the page indexable, and can I see a sample from the last 30 days that appears in Google?
• What rel attribute does the link carry on that sample, and is the href my URL or a redirect?
• Does the page expire? Morningstar's do; others may.
• What label does the outlet put on the page, and where?
• If the page is removed or deindexed, what happens to my money?

A seller who answers those five from a live page is worth buying from. One who answers “dofollow, DA 93, permanent” is reading the same spreadsheet everyone else is reading. The rest of the questions to ask before paying are in why press releases disappear after publication.