Dofollow and Nofollow are the attribute values defined inside the <a> tag in the code of a web page. These attributes are a part of technical SEO and make a huge difference whenever search engines interpret a hyperlink. In this blog post, the comparison between Dofollow and Nofollow helps you build a safe backlink profile for your website. Dofollow and Nofollow links are not visible to the users but make sure that these are considered in your SEO strategy.
A. How do Search Engines evaluate backlinks?
You can use SEO tools to analyze the backlinks to your website. Search engines help your rankings by qualitatively evaluating the backlinks:
New backlinks: You will always gain a higher value for newly placed backlinks than the old ones.
Relevant context: Whenever search engines analyze a backlink to your website, they look out for relevancy between an anchor text and your linked web page.
Natural/Organic links: Search engines always consider backlinks (especially in the first two paragraphs) that are created naturally for the website. You will get penalized if you participate in link schemes.
Backlink authority: The more the authority of an external source, the more value it will pass to your web page.
Referring domains: It is better to have more domains referring to your website and this can improve the rankings of your web pages on search engine results pages (SERPs).
B. What is a Dofollow Link?
A link that passes authority and link juice to the referred sources by default is termed as "dofollow link" or "regular link" or a "follow link". Following are the examples of a hyperlink:
<a>: contains the anchor text, link URL and all the details.
The above example 1 is a followed, regular link where there is no appearance of rel="dofollow" because the behavior of the link is by default. You will surely observe an increase in your rankings if your web pages are linked (dofollow) from high-quality external sources. As per the studies, the web pages ranking in the top two to nine have fewer backlinks as compared to the pages ranking first on Google search engine.
C. What is a Nofollow Link?
You can use a nofollow link if you don't want your web page to pass authority and link juice to the linked external source. In simple words, you tell search engines that you are not willing to credit an external domain.
In 2019, Google introduced two new values: rel="sponsored" (for paid partners) and rel="ugc" (for user-generated content such as forum posts and comments). These values can be combined with rel="nofollow" or you can use them separately. Following are the examples:
Nofollow links are never visible to users because these are placed in the code of web pages. You can check the nofollow backlinks as follows:
Access the code of the page where your backlink is placed. Right-click on the page, choose Inspect and search for the attribute value. If you could not find nofollow, it is a regular or dofollow link.
Use chrome extension "Nofollow" to detect Nofollow links (highlighted in red) on the page.
Use SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to analyze all the backlinks (categorized as nofollow and dofollow) to your website.
D. How Nofollow backlinks can improve your SEO?
As per the research by SEO experts, some high authority nofollow backlinks to your website are considered as positive ranking signals and always help you increase your rankings. If you are optimizing your web pages for other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo, all high-quality backlinks (nofollow; dofollow) have importance in their algorithms.
Balancing the backlink profile: It is better to have a mixture of dofollow (75%) and nofollow (25%) links to your website. Make sure that every backlink you earn should be authoritative and relevant to your web pages.
Increase in website traffic: You will drive traffic to your website if you place your web page links on popular sources. The relevant linked source to your website can be of interest for users and thus, they may visit more than one web page.
Opportunities to earn dofollow links: The more nofollow backlinks you gain for the website, the more your brand is recognized by the users. Such popularity can easily increase your chances of earning follow backlinks.
E. Can Nofollow links harm your rankings?
You can observe a decrease in your rankings if the spammy websites link out to you or you are involved in spammy nofollow link exchanges. Digital Marketing Boy suggests you analyze harmful backlinks to your website and remove them by contacting the referring websites or submitting a full list to Google using the disavow tool.
You should not consider nofollow value for an external link that is interesting and potentially helpful for your users. There is no need to assign nofollow to the internal links and this will help you to inform Google about the trustworthiness of your web pages. An SEO expert can either manually edit the code of a web page or download the CMS plugin for the addition of nofollow attribute value. Make sure that your natural backlink profile has a mixture of dofollow and nofollow links.
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