Whenever, we talk about Search Engine Optimization, often the discussion is of the common words like Noindex, Doindex, Nofollow, Dofollow, meta robots and so on. All these words are very important in terms of SEO. In this post I would like to tell you something about Nofollow and Dofollow. Especially for the beginners among us who are still not so good with SEO and are not yet sure at Nofollow or Dofollow. This post will certainly help you.
Did you know ? that the Nofollow uses an HTML attribute value to influence some search engines that have a hyperlink. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby automatically improving the quality of search engine results, thereby preventing the occurrence of spamdexing. This is a concept introduced by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in 2005.
Difference between Nofollow and Dofollow Links
Nofollow links attributes do not allow search engines bots to follow their links. This means when the webmaster links back to you with a nofollow attribute, it has no value for you because the search engines can not pass through this link your site. Only people can follow this link. Although some time ago, Google has made it clear that they do not respect the Nofollow link attributes, but the weighting of such links is always less.
Example of a nofollow link
<a href ='http: //www.google.com/' rel ='nofollow'> Google</a>
Dofollow links allow Google (and all other search engines) to follow them and reach your website. This results in a backlink. When a webmaster links back to us with such a link, search engines and people can follow our website. The best way to give someone a dofollow link is to use keywords in the anchor text. This means that if you link to any website, the targeted keywords will be used as anchor text.
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Example of a dofollow link:
<a href ='http: //www.google.com/' > Google</a>
Important note for ALL
In 2011, Google has said that they include the nofollow links as an outgoing link with respect to the page ranks of your website. Although it depends again on where the nofollow link is placed. If a nofollow link is placed at the bottom of the page, it has a minor impact as opposed to a link placed at the top of the page, it carries some influence.
Types of Nofollow Links
Robots Meta Tag: <meta name ='robots' content = 'nofollow' />
This means the bots / cralwers / spiders should not follow any links on the page.
Link attributes: <a href ='http: //www.google.com' rel ='nofollow'>
That says from the search engines this link can not happen.
Especially for WordPress blogs, you can use so-called Robots Meta plugins to set nofollow, noindex attributes in a single blog post or the complete website.
Small Tip: Try to use noindex attributes for pages like contact and nofollow attributes for affiliate link. If you link to any SPAM website for some reason, then use the best nofollow link.