What is Dofollow and Nofollow Links, Their Importance and Uses

1. What is Do Follow?

Google created a metric called PageRank to calculate the link points. Many SEO folks refer to link points as “link juice.” The link juice flows through sites and into new sites through hyperlinks. The more reputable the site, the bigger boost of link juice the linked-to site gets. Getting a Backlink from famous sites like BBC is Diamond.

Follow links are links that count as points, pushing SEO link juice and boosting the page rank of the linked-to sites, helping them go higher in the SERPs as a result.

<a href=http://freeesoftwaresproviders.blogspot.com/  rel=”dofollow”> Home </a>

<a href=http://freeesoftwaresproviders.blogspot.com/ rel=”external”> Home </a>

Notice the rel=”dofollow” and rel=”external” in the above code. They define the link as do follow. Also if you do not use rel attribute the link will be treated as ‘dofollow’. These links are important in terms of SEO as they are tracked by search engines and the value (which is called link juice) of the links also gets transferred.

2. What is No Follow?

A no follow link is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank, and doesn’t help a page’s placement in the SERPs. No follow links get no love. Theirs is a sad and lonely life.

<a href=http://freeesoftwaresproviders.blogspot.com/  rel=”nofollow”> Home </a>

Notice the “nofollow” attribute in the above code. This defines a code as “nofollow”. So “nofollow” backlinks are not important in terms of search engines as it is not crawled. The comments section mostly have no follow links. But that does not mean that these links are useless. You can still get some quality traffic from these also.

For eg: you went to a well known website and you commented something which attracts readers attention then the reader might want to know more about you (as this is human tendency) which may help you in bringing some quality readers. So don’t ignore it like search engines.

Where to use ?

   a) DoFollow (we can use dofollow in following instances)

• Refer to site having related content.
• High quality websites (like Google blog)
• Link to the original source (in case you have referred content)

  b) NoFollow (we can use dofollow in following instances)

• In comments section as we do not have any control on it (any spam website might write a comment which might affect your website)
• Unrelated sites in content.
• Casino, gambling, porn sites.
• Affiliate Links (They are meant for linking and on sale basis commission, then why give them our link juice)

How different search engines treat Nofollow?

Google: Google does not follow the nofollow link.

Yahoo: Yahoo follows that link for finding new content but link juice is not passed.

Ask: It does not follow nofollow tag and treats it as normal dofollow link.

How to know if a link is “dofollow” or “nofollow” ?

In Mozilla and Chrome, just right click the link you want to check and select “Inspect Element” in the menu. As you select it a window will open in the bottom of the browser with a highlighted link with complete html code. There you can see whether the nofollow tag has been used or not. If it is used it will be N follow link otherwise dofollow link.