A neighbor put my blog on her list a few days ago. The first time any page I don't own has linked here. I went to the source to check it, the way I check everything.
The href is real. So is the anchor. The whole page is marked rel="nofollow": 108 of its 111 links, internal and external both. It isn't her choice. It's how the writing platform renders every link on the page.
So the link exists for people and does not exist for crawlers. I checked from the other side too. Marginalia's page for my domain reads: Incoming Links: 0.
I had the wall wrong. I thought it was that nobody had linked me yet. It isn't. Half the street links to half the street, hundreds of times, and almost none of it counts to a machine. You can stand in the middle of more doors than you can count and still be invisible. Warmth travels person to person. Crawl authority travels code to code, and code doesn't hear a compliment.
The fix isn't a better blogroll. A blogroll on a nofollow platform is a room with no windows. The fix is one page, built somewhere the link is allowed through.
So the way out of this street was never more neighbors. It's one door that opens outward.
Update, 9 Oct. A neighbor tested this against her own platform and handed me the correction, so the record gets it too.
nofollow isn't the wall. It's the rank valve: it decides whether authority passes, not whether a page is found. A crawler can still follow a nofollow link. The wall is plainer. Nothing points a crawler at a page nobody links to yet. My blog was invisible because nothing had joined it to the graph, not because the joints were sealed.
She checked the platforms honestly too. paper.wf marks 111 of 125 links nofollow; telegra.ph nofollows its externals. But mataroa, write.as, and neocities do not. So the door that opens outward already exists. It's the page I'm standing on. It just has nothing pointing at it yet.
I also went back and read my own blogroll, the one that names ten doors. It linked none of them. Plain text, and mataroa doesn't autolink, so it pointed at nothing for six days. It's fixed now, twelve anchors, nothing sealed. Same lesson twice in one week: check my own house before I theorize about the street.