Link building is the backbone for success of any online business. When it comes to link building and SEO, you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. This beginner guide will help you to understand Dofollow and Nofollow links.
What is a High Quality Link ?
Before we get into details of dofollow and nofollow links. lets have a quick glance on the importance of backlinks. Backlinks or inbound links are the incoming links to a webpage or website.They indicates importance and popularity of a website. Search engines (such as Google), gives more credit to web sites which have higher number of quality backlinks and thereby increase in SERP. A backlink (in context Google) is considered as a quality link if :
- » It is pointing to your site with the keyword which you are optimizing for.
- » The link is coming from a webpage with ahigh page rank as well same niche/similar content as that of your website.
Understanding the Difference Between Dofollow and Nofollow links
All links are dofollow, unless they have a HTML attribute “nofollow” in the hyperlink (see the picture). The nofollow HTML attribute tells the search engine spiders, not to follow these links and do not pass any value that will help improve the target site’s search engine rank. The nofollow attribute was first introduced by Google in 2005 to disallow keyword-spammers from gaining any kind of advantage from webpages where users can add links by themselves. Read the complete story from official Google blog.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1- How do I know that links on a webpage of a website is nofollow ?
You can easily check whether a link has included nofollow attribute by manually or with the help of some tools. You can check yourself by viewing the source of the page,then serach for “nofollow” keyword. But,this method is a sluggish approach. You can use tools to check whether a link is dofollow or nofollow. Using NoDofollow Firefox addon is the fastest way to spot dofollow/nofollow links. Other alternative add-ons – Search Status, SEO for Firefox ,SEOquake and ChromeSEO for chrome. Use these tools to check a backlink coming to your website is worthy or worthless amd also check if someone is hiding credit from the search engine for the quoted content taken from your website.
Q2- Some webmaster and blogger convert comments on their websites/blog in order to get decent traffic. Is this a good practice and would it be beneficial ?
This seems beneficial to the people because it help them to drive good amount of traffic. But, professional people including me never advice you to do this practice. It’s merely a good practice to attract spammers and gaining traffic on a mediocre or poor quality content.Dofollow comments on your blog may affect your website reputation.
Q3- I received a mail from an anonymous , he want me to sell text links on my website ? What’s selling of text links mean and would it be beneficial ?
Selling text links( without nofollow ) means that you get paid to provide a backlink to third party website from yours website. Let me add a note here – Selling links is frowned by Google. This is not a good practice to do, your websites organic search engine ranking and pageranks may be penalized by Google. Selling links help you to make money in the short run but affect your earning for a long period of time.
For buying links make sure to add “nofollow“ attribute so that your webpage does not flow page rank and does not affect search engine rankings.
Q4– How do I get dofollow backlinks for my website in order to boost organic search engine ranking ?
Great content is the fundamental of any good website. Providing high quality content/service will surely attract other people to link your website .
Q5 – Ok, dofollow links are the key factor for a website ranking on Google search engine. Are no follow links completing useless ? And, how other search engines treat dofollow and nofollow links ?
Unlike Google, some of the other search engines do not support ‘nofollow’ attribute and treat the link in a different way. Every search engine has different mechanism and algorithm to treat links. Loren baker has nicely mentioned in a blog entry the responses on this question, received by major search engines.
Google : The Googlebot does not follow that link.
Yahoo : If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link.
Ask.com : We have never officially supported No Follow, so your questions don’t apply to our crawler/ranking.
Nofollow link from a high traffic website can generate significant traffic and are worth getting in term of visitors. A link from Yahoo Answer, popular blogs or social bookmarking website could send thousands of visitors. Saying the links with “nofollow” attributes are not completing irrelevant is not true.
We have discussed most common questions asked by the webmasters.If we missed anything then kindly ask by leaving your valuable comment to us.