Understand Nofollow Vs Dofollow Link Building in SEO

Did You Know?

Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexingfrom from occurring in the first place.  This is a concept introduced by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in the year 2005.

A link that is Do Follow counts as a back link and as such give authority to the site that is linked to. This helps it place higher in the search engine results pages. A link that will pass link juice and that is good for your search engine rankings if it points your way. It’s just easier to call it a “dofollow link” in Seo.

What Is The Difference?

No follow links attributes do not allow search engine bots to follow link. That means if the website owner is linking back to you with nofollow attributes, it does not pass on link juice. Only Humans will be able to follow the links. Though some time back Google made it clear that they don’t consider nofollow link attributes but weight age of such links are really less.

Example of Nofollow Link:

<a href=”http://www.google.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Google</a>

Dofollow links allow Google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. Giving us link juice and a back link. If a webmaster is linking back to you with this link both Search Engine and Humans will be able to follow you. The best way to give someone dofollow love is allowing keyword in the anchor text. This means when you are linking to any website or page, use the targeted keyword as anchor text.

Example of Dofollow Link:

<a href=”http://www.google.com/”>Google</a>

Types of No-Follow

1. Robots Meta Tag : <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

This tells bots/crawlers/spiders not to follow links on the full page.

2. Link Attribute : <a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>

The Conclusion

1. Activate Dofollow on your site’s comment section to encourage and reward commentators.
2. Monitor and moderate your comments to avoid unnecessary link spillage and reward only true, useful and contributing commentators (Might take some effort).
3. Do not add NoFollow to outbound links, except for affiliate sites, Bookmark Me and Subscribe Me widgets;
4. Never add NoFollow to inbound links.
5. You may opt to NoFollow your admin pages, contact forms, disclaimer and other administrative and legal pages.

Hope you understood the importance and the difference between Nofollow and Dofollow Links.