How to Fix: Natural follow ratio

Natural follow ratio is an SEO check in the Off-Page SEO Signals category, flagged as a lower-priority optimization — one to address after the more critical items are handled. It is also one of the most misunderstood checks in any audit, so let me be precise about what it does and does not mean.

What this check actually looks at

The check evaluates the balance between followed and nofollowed links — and it applies in two directions people often confuse. Inbound: a healthy backlink profile is a natural mix of dofollow and nofollow links, because a site that earns links organically picks up both. A profile that is 100% dofollow, all with keyword-stuffed anchor text, looks manufactured. Outbound: the links you place on your own pages should also look natural — sponsored and affiliate links marked rel="sponsored", user-generated links marked rel="ugc", and genuine editorial references left as normal followed links.

Why it matters for SEO

Search engines have spent twenty years learning what a manipulated link profile looks like, and an unnatural follow ratio is one of the oldest tells. Sites that bought links, ran link schemes, or stuffed followed links into every comment and footer share a statistical fingerprint. You are not trying to hit a magic number — there is no ideal ratio Google publishes — you are trying to look like what you should be: a site that earns links honestly and marks its commercial ones correctly. The bigger risk is the reverse: passing link equity through paid or affiliate links you forgot to mark sponsored, which is a link-scheme violation waiting to be actioned.

How to check it yourself

• Pull your backlink profile in Ahrefs, Semrush, or Google Search Console’s Links report and look at the dofollow/nofollow spread and the anchor-text distribution. Branded and URL anchors should dominate; exact-match commercial anchors should be the minority.
• Audit your own outbound links: are affiliate and paid links marked rel="sponsored"? Are comment and forum links rel="ugc" or nofollow?
• Watch for a sudden spike of low-quality followed backlinks — that is often a negative-SEO attack or a bad link-building vendor, not organic growth.

How to fix it in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: varies

1. Mark commercial outbound links correctly: rel="sponsored" for paid and affiliate links, rel="ugc" for user-generated ones. The block editor lets you toggle these per link; a plugin can automate affiliate links site-wide.
2. Make sure comment links carry nofollow/ugc (WordPress does this by default — confirm a plugin has not overridden it).
3. Leave genuine editorial references — the sources you actually cite because they are useful — as normal followed links. Nofollowing everything outbound is its own unnatural pattern.
4. If you find a spike of spammy inbound followed links you did not earn and cannot get removed, prepare a disavow file for Search Console — but only as a last resort, for clearly toxic links.

What I would do — and what I would not

I would not chase a target ratio. There is no number to hit, and trying to “correct” your ratio by adding or nofollowing links to move a percentage is exactly the manufactured behaviour the check is designed to catch. Do the two things that are real: mark your commercial links honestly, and earn inbound links by being worth linking to. A natural ratio is a byproduct of doing legitimate work, never a target you engineer. If your off-page profile looks unnatural, the fix is upstream — in how you are getting links — not in tweaking rel attributes to fool a statistic.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

• Google Search Console – the Links report and the disavow tool
• Ahrefs or Semrush – for backlink profile and anchor-text analysis
• An affiliate-link manager (e.g. ThirstyAffiliates) – to apply rel="sponsored" consistently
• SEO Roadmap – complete SEO audit and action plan tool

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.