Meaning and Differences Between Nofollow and Dofollow Links

Anybody new to SEO especially link building must have come about people mentioning ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ links. To a newbie these terms may be confusing. So I’d like to shed light to the meaning and differences between nofollow and dofollow links.

When I started blogging, fear usually grip me whenever I heard anything about SEO. I just hate it. In the long run, I came to the realisation that if I really want to become a successful blogger, I need to understand how to optimise my contents for my readers and search engines. SEO isn’t difficult as I thought.

Some of the common terms talked about in SEO is nofollow and dofollow. When I was trying to explain these two terms to a new blogger, he was baffled. He told me he has already followed the entire external link on his blog including untrusted links by adding no relationship. By the end of this post you will be able to understand the differences between nofollow and dofollow links, and how to apply them on a link.

What is Dofollow?

The term dofollow is an HTML tag that tells search engines bots to crawl/follow a link. If a link is given dofollow, it simply means you have pass the SEO strength, or “PageRank” of the page to the site that you link to.

Below is an example of a dofollow link:

What is Nofollow?

Nofollow too is also an HTML tag. It tells the search engines bots not to crawl a link. When nofollow is added to a link, you are telling the spiders not to follow the link even though users may click and follow the link and your SEO strength or PageRank will not be transferred.

Here is what Google said about nofollow:

“In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.”

To nofollow a link, you need to add the rel=nofollow tag to the HTML link. The link will now look like this:

After explaining like this to someone, he posed a question to me regarding the application of nofollow relationship attribute on his website. Some people too will also have this same question on their mind.

• Use nofollow relationship attribute on your blog comment section.
• Use nofollow relationship attribute on external and internal links you don’t want to pass your pagerank.

Share your comments and suggestions – I’d love to hear from you!