Mar
If you’ve been doing any kind of reading about link building, then you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings. But, to the person who is new to all of this, it may be kind of confusing. I am going to help break it down for you.
When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that link is:
It includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.
You are able to add more HTML to the code above, in order to tell the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website. You may be thinking… “Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site?” This is a very valid concern, which I will address further down. First, I am going to show you how to modify the HTML in order to tell the search engine spiders to crawl a link or not.
To tell the spiders to crawl a link, you don’t have to do anything. Simply using the format shown above, the search engine spiders will crawl the link provided.
To tell the spiders to NOT crawl a link, you need to add the following code to the HTML code above:
It would then look like:
Basically, there is no true “dofollow”, it is just NOT using the “nofollow” tag. Pretty simple, eh? (No, I am not Canadian… well, kind of.)
Why does this matter?
When you are using different methods (hopefully from this site) in order to build links on other websites (to increase your search engine rankings), you need to determine if the websites you are attempting to get your site listed on use the “nofollow” tag or not. If they do, it may still be a good idea to try to get that link there, but it is generally regarded as not the best use of time since the search engines don’t follow that link and you don’t get any increase in search engine rankings from that link.
So, when you are looking for sites and blogs that you could leave your link on (through reciprocal links, commenting on a blog, directory submissions, buying links, etc) figure out if the links in the particular section of the site you are aiming for uses “nofollow” or not. (A good way to do this is to view the source code, or find some good “dofollow” lists such as Courtney Tuttle’s D-list )
Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site? (Or, Why would I use “nofollow”?)
There are many reasons you would want to use the “nofollow” tag, such as:
1) Paid Links: This is recommended by Google. Essentially, your sites page rank give a small amount of rank juice to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking, which is the purpose of link building, to get that juice from others). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that.
2) Maybe in your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link juice back to their site. It is personal preference.
3) When linking to major, very popular sites. If you are linking to google.com, yahoo.com, digg.com (the front page), cnn.com, or whoever else, they are already popular, so you might as well use “nofollow” since your link won’t make or break them.
I hope this has been helpful. Feel free to comment or use the contact link in the top right of the page if you have any questions about this, or any link building subject.
UPDATE: Now that you know what dofollow is, you can easily find dofollow blogs with my DoFollow Blogs Search Engine, DoFollow Diver!
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Yesterday, I was looking for a post like this to link to on my latest article.
I just linked to your post.
Thanks for sharing.
Cheers,
Rocky
Thanks for the link man!
Great article, glad your blog is coming along nicely. Article Dugg!
Good information here and I like the Canadian comment, eh. Another use for the dofollow “tag” that I’m seeing is on message boards to help encourage the community building efforts.
great explanation! I stumbled you for it. Looks you have got a blog with a future on your hands, shame you don´t offer rss per email …
Great information! I always wonder when the right time to apply the ‘nofollow’. Now it’s crystal clear. Thanks for the info!
Ivanpw
You didn’t get into the whole “do nofollow links count?” debate. I was hoping you would give that some treatment….
I use nofollow on most of my links … especially to affiliate programs. For a little while, I tried Andy Beard’s “No Follow Dupes” plugin … it nofollows all links on the front page of the blog, with the individual pages and posts behaving normally. I eventually turned it off as I realized I’m just not advanced enough to be sure I was using it correctly.
Todd
Living in Hawaii’s last blog post..Skate Boarding at Hickam Skate Park
Thank you very much, totally new information for me.
Soham’s last blog post..Prosperity with Karma Yoga
hi there. I’ve been reading your entries regarding PRs and this dofollow and nofollow ^__^ nicely written. thanks for the info
Tessa’s last blog post..Sunday’s Tag-day #2
I was in search of this and even started a thread on DP. Now I got it and did my blog do follow!! yeah it is just removing no follow.
Thanks for the valuable information.
Jennie
Chaya Jennifer’s last blog post..Make Money Online
Thanks,
I am very new to SEO work on my sites. Link building is a high priority for me now.
Good information.
DogTrainingMaryland’s last blog post..Puppy Training-Bite Work-Protection
Great Article, thank you very much….
Scott
great post men… i do also like your dofollow search engine..
cheers,
hussein
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I’ve been recently trying to know if all the search engines work the same way with dofollow and nofollow, do anyone has information about that?
??????’s last blog post..?????? El Canto Del Loco - Eres tonto ?????
No, all search engines don’t work the same…. Google is one of the lone wolves in not following nofollow… Yahoo and MSN follow nofollow links… but, if you have limited link building time, focus on Dofollow, since google has over 50% of all search engine traffic on the internet!
Check out my DoFollow Blog Search Engine for some easy dofollow links.
Thanks for the answer
Actually I should focus on Baidu, because my aim are chinese users, but I guess you don’t know too much about Baidu. In China, Google is the “2nd one” and I even don’t know if they use the same algorythm for differente languages.
Thanks a lot of, and congrats for the blog, so useful!
??????’s last blog post..?????? El Canto Del Loco - Eres tonto ?????
Interesting that MSN and Yahoo would ignore them. I guess I can see the argument either way. On one side, you’re respecting the web builder’s wishes and on the other you’re looking for a more “honest” view of a site.
Now, can linking to a trash site hurt you? I was reading a little earlier about someone who spammed ProBlogger commenters with link trades. He mentioned it might ding you with Google (after pointing out he wasn’t involved). Do you know if Google takes those things into account?
Brent2’s last blog post..And, Low, Come the Upgrades
Excellent explanation on dofollow and nofollow!
Geee…thnks a lot!
I didn’t understand all these until i read this page
Now i’ve got more knowledge on this topic…
Surprisingly this is the first time i’ve actually heard about the dofollow..i’m quite familiar with the nofollows and how it works.. Its interesting to know that we now have its opposite around..Welcome Miss Dofollow!!
SEO Updates last blog post..Slow Pages Bad for SEO
Hi, many thanks for making this post, I have recently made my blog (cutewriting.blogsopt.com) a dofollow blog. And I used this article here to link out to what dofollow and nofollow are. Many thanks, keep the work going.
Lenin Nair
Lenin Nairs last blog post..Hail! These Talents: Victor Hugo and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Thank you for all your helpful information I have been reading anything i can about SEO and how to optimize my site. I’m going to bookmark this site and come often.
Thanks - I’ve been link building for about a week and this was a very helpful article.
Data Entry - Document Scanning - Database Programming
Breakaway one morething. As you have given huge information on dofollow and nofollow but one morething I would like to tell that google gives less importance to nofollow but if we optimize yahoo, msn and other search engine then I personally found that still nofollow are given some improtance by these search engine.
Your blog has been very helpful in my efforts. Thanks!
I know about the nofollow tag but I’ve never heard it called dofollow, did you make that up yourself.
oral seymours last blog post..Dealcost Inc.
Nope…. it’s been around longer than I’ve been interested in link building, and the implications of nofollow and dofollow.
But I still do not understand how I have to use the rel=”nofollow”… and I’m seeing some rel=”external nofollow”… do your understand the meaning of it?
Ruben Zevallos Jr.s last blog post..Chinaglia quer votar regras para escutas telefônicas
I use nofollow in my old paid posts and links that I insert in my original posts. I just took off the nofollow from comments.
Claudias last blog post..Do follow in comments