What is Nofollow and Dofollow Links – For Beginners

If you think about making your website or blog, then plan different things to make the website a success. Along with having good content, good SEO is also necessary for the success of the website. Backlinks are a very important step of SEO that website owners plan. With the help of Backlinks, good quality traffic can be increased and these are the incoming links that come from any other website outside your website. The two most important terms of Backlinks are – nofollow and dofollow links.

What is Nofollow links:

Nofollow links are those links which are given only to follow the human but the search engine does not follow them. When a link is tagged with a Nofollow link, it indicates to the search engine that it should not follow and ignore this link. Nofollow links do not help in increasing PageRank nor does it pass link juice. When search engines crawl a website and if a link (with Nofollow tag) of another website is found on that website, then search engines ignore that link and do not follow it. Do not follow means search engine does not pass any link juice. These Nofollow links can only be followed by humans and are useful for their reference. That’s why “nofollow” backlinks are not important from the point of view of the search engine. The biggest example of no follow link is – comments section. Many blog owners post a link to their website in the comment section on the post of another well known website to create backlinks for the purpose of increasing the traffic of their website. In this case, the original website owner tags your website as a Nofollow link, so that no link juice is passed to your website, but the advantage for you is that when a website visitor reads your comment and as human nature, he reads your comment. Keeping interest to know about your blog, clicks on the link, then the traffic of your blog increases even if it is nofollow. In this way you can get some quality readers. Although the nofollow link is not important from the point of view of the search engine, but it cannot be avoided because even if humans click on these links, then quality traffic comes to your website.

Example of Nofollow link –

<a href=http://bloggeradda.com/ rel=”nofollow”> bloggeradda </a>

Dofollow links – 

When search engines crawl a website, then the links of other websites found on our website are also checked. If those links are doFollow links then search engines follow those links and pass link juice. By default, when you add a link to a blog, WordPress or BlogSpot blog adds the dofollow links attribute.

For eg: <a href=http://bloggeradda.com/ rel=”dofollow”> Follow bloggeradda </a>

Pay attention here that rel=dofollow links means this link dofollow. If you do not use the rel attribute, then it will be a dofollow link by default. These backlinks are important from the point of view of SEO because the search engine passes link juice and gives importance to them

** Link Juice –

When the search engine follows our link when there is a doFollow link of another website on one website, it passes the link juice. This means your website (which has an external link), recommends quality votes to the external website, which provides power and quality to the external website. This link juice helps in PageRank of external website.

Where should these links be used and how:

a) Dofollow links should be used as mentioned below –

1. If you are referring to such a website which has content related to your website like food to food blog, tech to tech blog etc.
2 High quality blog (like Google blog)
3 Original source link (if you refer content)

b) NoFollow should be used as given below –

1 In the Comments section, because many SPAM websites can also comment here, so the search engine does not have to follow those websites.
2 Those sites whose content is not similar.
3 Affiliate Links, paid links, gambling, porn sites etc.

How search engines treat Nofollow –

1. Google: Google does not follow nofollow link.

2. Bing: It can follow but does not use for website ranking.

3. Yahoo: Yahoo follows the link according to new content search but does not pass any link juice. Apart from this, it is also used to index the linked page.

4.Ask: It does not follow nofollow.

How to add Nofollow Attributes to a link?

If you notice the normal link then it will appear as shown below –

<a href=”https://www.bloggeradda.com”>bloggeradda in english </a>

Now if it is to be made a no-follow link, then only the Nofollow tag has to be added to it –

<a href=”https://www.bloggeradda.com” rel=”nofollow”>bloggeradda in english </a> This link has now become a nofollow link.

Suggestion :

1. To maintain the link juice of your website, first of all, the comment section of your blog and all unknown or unreliable sources should be set Nofollow.
2. You can keep dofollow links the internal links of your website which are by default. Due to the website’s inter dofollow links, the search engine will visit more and more of your pages, which is good for SEO.