Know About DoFollow & NoFollow Link: SEO Basics
Whenever we talk about Search engine optimization (SEO) then one words comes in mind whcih is noindex, doindex, nofollow, dofollow, meta robots and so on. If you have blogger site then you should know about these things. All the words have equal importance in the book of SEO.
Today, In this post i am going to talk about Nofollow and Dofollow. Especially for newbies who are new to SEO or people who are still not clear about Nofollow & Dofollow, so this post will be useful for you.
What is Nofollow?
Nofollow is a value which is assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link’s target in the search engine index. In general word we can say that Nofollow is used with rel attribute in HTML for other site link which add in post and we don’t want to target those link in search engine.
Nofollow value was originally used to stop comment spam in blogs. Believing that comment spam affected the entire blogging community and this is proposed by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in 2005.
Example:
<a href=”https://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>
What is DoFollow?
Dofollow is a descriptor of links which describing that search engines crawl them and count them as votes of quality
By Default, all links are dofollow links unless they are modified to be nofollow links manually or automatically changed by a website setting. Search engines crawlers follow dofollow links. In other words we can say that they continue to crawl other pages they discover through standard links
A dofollow value is simply a descriptor while a dofollow value for the rel attribute doesn’t exist in HTML. Therefor, dofollow links are technically any links that don’t have an rel attribute with a nofollow value.
Example:
<a href=”https://www.example.com”>Link Text</a>
Difference between Nofollow & Dofollow
Nofollow links attributes which do not allow search engine bots to follow link. That means if the website owner is linking back to you with nofollow attributes, it does not pass on link juice. Only users will be able to follow the links. While Dofollow links allow google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. If a webmaster is linking back to you with this link both search engine and users will be able to follow you.
Type of NoFollow
Robots Meta Tag :
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”>
This tag tells that bots/crawlers/spiders not to follow links on the full page.
Link Attribute :
<a href=”https://www.facebook.com” rel=”nofollow”>Facebook</a>
This Tag tells that search engines not to count the link in terms of ranking pages.
Conclusion
Whenever you write a post then try to keep noindex attritube for page like content and nofollow attribute for the affiliate links on your blop posts. If you are linking to any spam website for any reason, always use the nofollow link attribute.
Do let me know if you have any questions regarding basics of Nofollow or Dofollow?