What Is DoFollow Links and NoFollow Links - The Differences

Every link that points to a webpage of a website gives that page an SEO boost. However, whether that page can get this boost or not depends on the type of the link that points to it, i.e., whether it is a DoFollow link or a NoFollow link. In the following, we’d like to give you some basics about NoFollow links and DoFollow links.

A DoFollow link allows the spider of your search engine to crawl your link. This adds points to the SEO of the website and effectively increases its ranking.

A NoFollow link does not allow the spiders of your search engine to crawl the link. As a result, such links do not contribute to the SEO of a website. Both DoFollow and NoFollow links are visible to users and can be clicked to navigate to the page that readers want to see.

DoFollow Links

These are the normal hyperlinks that allow the search engines to follow through them. They contribute greatly in the calculation of a website’s rankings. The greater the good DoFollow links are, the higher a website’s ranking can be.

The default links created in HTML without setting the “rel” attribute to “nofollow” are all DoFollow links. Having such links allows your website to be indexed faster. You can get more exposure for your website because more and more people can link to it. Also, because of the higher search engine rankings, your website can be considered to be a more reputable one.

NoFollow Links

NoFollow links do not allow search engines to follow through the links. Such links are created by setting the “rel” attribute of the hyperlink to “nofollow”. All NoFollow links are not considered to calculate a website’s ranking.

However, this type of links is beneficial when reducing spam-indexing, for they are not counted in search engine results.

There are two ways in which NoFollow links can be created – using Robots Meta Tag or Link Attribute. The Robots Meta Tag tells the spiders and crawlers not to follow any of the links on your entire page. The Link Attribute is used when you want to tell the search engine not to consider a particular link while calculating the website’s ranking.

Since the inception of NoFollow link, it has made it easier for the search engines to know exactly which links are worth following and which ones are not. Consequently, the results produced by the search engine are much better.

How to Decide Whether to Use a DoFollow or NoFollow Link?

Webmasters must use NoFollow and DoFollow links wisely for the best SEO. Certain situations require you to use NoFollow links as opposed to DoFollow links.

Following are situations when it is advisable to go with a NoFollow link.

• Paid links
• Comments – Comments posted by visitors on your blog can be vague and sometimes inconsequential. There is no use having a search engine crawl through these words.
• Forums – Forums get many posts in them, and many of these posts are irrelevant and can be considered as spam.
• Untrusted Content – A NoFollow link should be created if the content that the link leads to is considered to be non-trusted by Google.
• Non-Indexed Pages – There are sometimes pages on your website that you don’t want to be displayed publicly. Therefore, they should also not appear in the search engine results.

A DoFollow link must certainly be used in the following cases.

• Links to posts with original, up-to-date and informative content.
• Links to guest blogs – Such links created to guest blogs whose content is related to your website can get referral traffic to your site and give the SEO a boost.