Understand DoFollow & Nofollow Link: SEO Basics

Whenever we talk about search engine optimization, some of the common words are noindex, doindex, nofollow, dofollow, meta robots and so on. All the words hold equal importance in the SEO. In this post I will be explaining about Nofollow and Dofollow. Especially for newbies who are new to SEO or people who are still not clear about Nofollow or dofollow, this post will be useful.

Do-Follow Links:

When Google bots are crawling a website they look for external links point to other websites. If this links is “do follow” then search engines will follows the link and so link juice gets passed.

For example:

<a href= http://codigitalmarketing.blogspot.in/  rel=”dofollow”> Digital Marketing and SEO </a>

<a href= http://codigitalmarketing.blogspot.in/  rel=”external”> Digital Marketing and SEO </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.

No-Follow Links:

If a search engine finds a “no follow” backlink it will just ignore the link and will not get deeper into crawling and no link juice is passed. 

For example:

<a href= http://codigitalmarketing.blogspot.in/ rel=”nofollow”> Digital Marketing and SEO </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 example: 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.

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 No follow link otherwise dofollow link.