Being a blogger, one knows the value of Search engine optimization. Whenever we talk about SEO some of the most common and basic terms that came first are meta robots, doindex, noindex, dofollow, nofollow and a lot more.
These all things are the basics and building blocks of SEO and hold equal importance. Most of the bloggers don’t know exactly What are DoFollow & NoFollow Links ? and end up ruining their website search rankings.
Today, In this post I will explain the basic terms of SEO in link building i.e about DoFollow & NoFollow links. Especially for the new bloggers who are not well known to the Search Engine Optimization terms.
Till now, You only know that links are those hyperlinks or the web address/ URLs.
But In the year 2005, Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen gave a concept of NoFollow and DoFollow links
What Are NoFollow Links ?
Nofollow is an attribute of HTML assigned to hyperlink to instruct the search engine bots that the hyperlink should not affect the target link’s ranking in search engine index.
It was implemented so as to reduce the effect of different types of search engine spam, resulting in the improvement of search engine results and preventing spammy links from occurring at first place.
With the introduction of NoFollow Links, DoFollow links were defined as those links that affect the target link’s search engine indexing.
What Is Difference Between DoFollow & NoFollow Links?
NoFollow link attributes don’t allow the search engine to follow the link. It means if you’re having a nofollow link from any of a high authority website than NoFollow Attribute will not allow to pass the link juice.
In other words, you’ll not get any benefit from this link as it does’nt allow to pass the link juice. Links will work, but will not be helpful in terms of Search Engine Optimization.
It’s a great way to prevent passing the link juice from your site to another. simply apply the NoFollow Attribute in the hyperlink and that’s it.
Tip: Always add NoFollow attributes to the links made to spammy sites. It will prevent you from spam penalty.
This is what a NoFollow link looks like :
<a href=”http://www.xyz.com/” rel=”nofollow”>BlogsGeek</a>
Whereas DoFollow links allows the search engine to follow the link. It allows the search engine to crawl through the link and transfer link juice from one site to another.
DoFollow links will help you to pass the link juice and make it accessible the search engine too.
It helps you to build Domain Authority by having good and relevant DoFollow links, also known as Backlink.
Example Of DoFollow Link :
<a href=”http://www.xyz.com/”>BlogsGeek</a>
Note : All the links are DoFollow by default until NoFollow attribute is added in the hyperlink.Don’t worry you don’t need to do anything for making a link dofollow.
It’s just got a name after the introduction of NoFollow Link Attribute.
Check Out : Top Google Ranking Factors You Must Know
Let me tell you that recently Google has said that they will still consider the nofollow links as an outgoing link. Thus have weightage in terms of the distribution of page rank from your page.
Though again it also depends on where that nofollow link is placed. Placing a nofollow link at the bottom of the page has the least impact, and when placed at the top of the page, it carries some impact.
Types Of NoFollow
NoFollow are also of two types :
- Robots Meta Tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
This tells bots/crawlers/spiders not to follow links on the full page.
- Link Attribute: <a href=”http://www.xyz.com” rel=”nofollow”>
This tells search engines not to count the link in terms of ranking pages.
This was all about DoFollow and NoFollow Link. Still have queries ?
Do let me know in the below comments.
