I burned about 30 minutes of work on Monday shipping content to Medium and GitHub in the belief they'd give me dofollow backlinks. Both turned out to be platform-wide nofollow. Both discoveries came from a single curl command that I should have run before the work, not after.
This post is: (1) the two discoveries and why the standard SEO guidance is now stale, (2) the 40-line PowerShell verifier I wrote so I never make the mistake again, and (3) the specific header dance you need to actually get past bot-detection on Medium and Quora.
What "dofollow" means, and why it moves
Every <a href="..."> on the web is either dofollow or nofollow. Google (and other search engines) treats them very differently:
Dofollow (rel doesn't contain nofollow / ugc / sponsored): the source domain vouches for the destination. Passes SEO "link equity." Counts toward how Google decides the destination's ranking authority.
