Whenever we talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), some common words are noindex, doindex, nofollow, dofollow, meta robots, etc. All these words have equal importance in the field of SEO. In this article, I will explain Nofollow and Dofollow. This article is especially for those who are new to SEO or those who are not clear about the meaning of Nofollow and dofollow.
did you know?
Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engine robots that a hyperlink should not affect the ranking of the link target in the search engine index. It is designed to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spam indexing from happening in the first place. It is a concept proposed by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in 2005.
What is the difference between NoFollow and DoFollow?
The nofollow link attribute does not allow search engine robots to follow the link. This means that if a website owner links back to your website using the nofollow attribute, no link juice will be passed. Only humans can follow these links. Although Google made it clear a while ago that they do not consider nofollow link attributes, such links do carry less weight. Even so, it is still a good habit to use the nofollow link attribute for links that you do not want to pass link juice.
Dofollow links allow Google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. This gives us link authority and backlinks. If a webmaster uses this link to link back to your website, both search engines and users can follow you. The best way to make users like Dofollow links is to use keywords in the anchor text. This means, when you link to any website or page, use the target keyword as the anchor text.
Dofollow link example:
Note: All hyperlinks are dofollow by default. Therefore, you do not need to do anything to set a link as a do-follow link.
Important Notice:-
Google recently stated that they will still count nofollow links as outbound links in the page rank distribution. However, it also depends on where the nofollow links are placed. Placing nofollow links at the bottom of the page has the least impact, while placing them at the top of the page will have some impact.
Types of No-Follow
- Robots meta tag : <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
This will tell the robot/crawlers/spider not to follow the links throughout the page.
This tells search engines not to count that link in terms of page ranking.
Quick Tip: Try to keep noindex attribute for pages like contact and keep nofollow attribute for affiliate links in blog posts. If you link to any spammy sites for any reason, use nofollow link attribute.
Let me know if you have any more questions about the basics of Nofollow or Dofollow?
Further reading:
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