What is Dofollow and Nofollow Links And How To Use Them

All the sites and webpages are connected in one way or other using links. If you are a new to search engine optimization you will be hearing more SEO terms and on the go you will gain more knowledge. Many bloggers are confused about dofollow and nofollow links. These are the two hyperlink attributes which were introduced by Matts Cutts in the year of 2006 for enhancing the search engine optimization. In this post I will tell you everything about dofollow and nofollow links and how to use them.

I’ll start off by describing DoFollow Links and NoFollow links individually and explaining the use of each one.

DoFollow Link:

A link is determined to be either a DoFollow or NoFollow by the rel tag added to the link (I’ll explain exactly how to use NoFollow/DoFollow later). If the link does not have the “rel” tag then it is automatically set to be a DoFollow. When a link is placed anywhere on the internet (Website, blog, forum, YouTube, etc) it will pass some of the link popularity of the page/site where the link is located to the website it is pointing too. Google considers only the link that can be followed and that is do follow links.

Dofollow backlinks are the need of every blogger because it helps a lot to the linked blog/site. Actually, when the search engine’s crawler comes to the webpage for crawling and when it finds any dofollow link then it land on that page and also crawl that. That’s why we’re recommending you to boost your dofollow backlinks but slowly slowly not like a spammer.

NoFollow Link:

Those links which are having rel=’nofollow’ attribute are known as Nofollow backlinks.  To stop spammers gaining value from links that where just spam and should not have been adding value to the websites they where pointing to, the NoFollow tag was born. Now most links that are posted in forums, blogs, basically anywhere you can comment are tagged with NoFollow.

When search engine’s Bot crawls the webpage and it comes to any link then it will check that it is dofollow or nofollow. If that is nofollow then it will ignore that link and will continue crawling other content but if that is dofollow then crawler will land on it. So this means that spamming your link all over forums and blogs will not add any value what so ever to the ranking of the website it is pointing too. The only benefit is that having your link on those pages could possible receive some clicks from visitors which would give you some extra traffic.

How To Use A NoFollow/DoFollow Link

Adding the NoFollow tag to one of your links is pretty easy and to make a link DoFollow you can simply ignore this tag and the link will naturally be a DoFollow. So below I will show you what a normal link looks like;

<a href=”LinkURL”>Anchor Text (link text)</a>

So above is the normal way to make a link and it would pass link popularity (often called link juice) to the website it is linking too. Now let’s make this same link a NoFollow link so that no link juice is passed. Below is how you make a link NoFollow;

<a href=”LinkURL” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text (link text)</a>

If you are wordpress user then you can also use nofollow external plugin that will make all your site external link nofollow automatically.

When Should You Use DoFollow Links

DoFollow links are very important and you should use them. If you are running a website and you link to another site because you want your visitors to see that page because it has some value in some way then you should use a DoFollow link. This will show search engines that the page you are linking to does have some value for people interested in the topic of your website. This will help search engines rank the better quality websites above those that try to get spam links.

DoFollow Links Don’t Hurt

Some people slam the NoFollow Tag onto every link leaving their website because they heard that if you use a DoFollow link you are passing away some of your link juice. This is totally wrong, search engines do not punish you for linking to a website with a DoFollow link, they actually prefer that because it helps them rank websites better. It has also been said that linking to a quality website with a DoFollow link can actually help your own search engine rankings. So don’t use a NoFollow link when you link to a website you think deserves it.