Developer finds all five backlinks were nofollow after weeks of zero Google rankings

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A developer launched their portfolio site on 23 July and spent over two weeks building backlinks across platforms including LinkedIn, GitHub, Upwork, and X, only to find the site still did not rank for its own brand name. Despite the site being fully indexed on Google, as confirmed via Search Console, it had received no ranking authority because every single backlink carried a nofollow attribute. Major platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub, and X apply nofollow to all user-generated profile links by default to prevent spam, a detail the developer had overlooked until manually inspecting the HTML source of each page. The developer also discovered that GitHub applies nofollow even to links merged into popular README files, meaning a successfully merged pull request passed zero SEO value. The experience highlighted a key distinction between a page being indexed and a page actually ranking, and the developer advised others to inspect link attributes directly before assuming any backlink is contributing to search visibility.

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