Difference between DoFollow and NoFollow Links

 

A blogger carves out the niche of SEO as it is the most important factor for a Blog to become successful. There are numerous terms that we encounter while dealing with SEO. Some of the common terms that we may face include Meta tags, description, DoFollow, NoFollow, noindex, etc. All these words have their own level of significance in terms of their utilization. Today I am going to help you gain some insight on DoFollow as well as NoFollow links in the context of SEO.

DoFollow vs. NoFollow

Before I begin to explain the difference between the two types of links, I will first shed some light on how numerous links work in the world of SEO. When people or bot tend to visit any of the inbound links of a website or a page, the overall SEO rank of the page gets a small increment. You can take these small inbound links as the points which help you rank better. More links you have, higher is the level of increment you earn.

Now, Google tends to keep a record of these visited inbound links or let’s say the total points accumulated by the website and then analyses these links. Seeing that a number of people are interested in a particular page or a page is getting a high number of views, it increases the rank of that particular page in its index. This helps Google in providing optimal results to the people searching for a certain information.

To keep a note of these visited inbound links, Google has created a unit of measurement called as the ‘PageRank’. These points earned are also called as the “link juice”. This link juice flows onto from one site to the other through the inbound links or what we call as hyperlinks. Higher the reputation of a site, higher is the amount of juice that the new website or the referred website gets.

DoFollow Links

Now, let us move on to the concept of DoFollow links. DoFollow links are the links which help the site earn brownie points. These are the links which actually lead to flow of information from one site to the other. These help in increasing the overall rank of the website and hence attain a higher SERP rank.

NoFollow Links

Now these are the links which do not help in increasing the rank of a page in SERP. They do not help the websites earn any brownie points and hence these are the ones which get no special love from either the search engine bot or the website developers.

You can easily create a NoFollow link in HTML through the following method:

<a href=www.abcde.com rel=”NoFollow”>Text</a>

This is simply an indication for the bot or the WebCrawler that do not count this link.

But don’t think that this link is completely useless and is just increasing the load of the page. In fact, these links tend to possess one of the most significant benefits.

Benefits of NoFollow Links

As I have mentioned before, a DoFollow link is used to increase the websites rank in SERP, through the transfer of ‘link juice’ from one page to other. In a perfect world, it is used by people or the viewers to find out which of the pages are most popular and have higher levels of viewership.

However, sadly our world is not the perfect one and what many so-called “SEO experts” tend to do is that they trick the engines with various unethical techniques just to boost the ranking of their page. One of the common ways in older times was to build in links just to artificially increase the ranking of the web page.

Therefore, there was a lot of spamming just with the intention to get backlinks to the web page. There used to be ridiculous commenting, blog posting and every trick through which the number of links could be grown.

But as soon as the feature of NoFollow link came into existence, this method of artificial rank boosting came under control. NoFollow link has done wonders to stop unnecessary spamming and commenting, as people know that this won’t be counted for their PageRank. Numerous websites such as Wikipedia and WordPress automatically assign a NoFollow attribute to the user submitted links or the links submitted in the reference section in the case of Wikipedia.

You can still find some spamming through blog commenting, but it has reduced to a great extent.

Also, do not think that NoFollow links are of no value. In case, present at the right position and in a right way, it can help you generate a lot of traffic. This just won’t be counted in for your PageRank, but apart from this, it will provide all the benefits that the standard website link provides.

Also, with the change in Google’s policy, there have been numerous updates with regards to policy for page ranking, and now other factors play a significant role in deciding the rank of your web page.

Summarizing

Try and go for brand or name building instead of just focusing on link building. In case you adopt measures for producing quality content and do not indulge yourself in unethical ways of gaining website rank then there is nothing that can stop you from building a top ranking page or website on Google.