When ever we talk about search engine optimization, some of the common words are noindex, doindex, nofollow, dofollow, meta robots and so on. All the words hold equal importance in the book of SEO. In this post I will be explaining about Nofollow and Dofollow. Specially for newbies who are new to SEO or people who are still not clear about Nofollow or dofollow, this post will be useful.
Did You Know?
Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. This is a concept introduced by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen in the year 2005.
What Is The Difference?
Nofollow links attributes do not allow search engine bots to follow link.That means if the website owner is linking back to you with nofollow attributes, it does not pass on link juice. Only Humans will be able to follow the links. Though some time back Google made it clear that they don’t consider nofollow link attributes but weightage of such links are really less.
Example of Nofollow Link:
<a href=”http://www.google.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Google</a>
Dofollow links allow google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. Giving us link juice and a backlink. If a webmaster is linking back to you with this link both Search Engine and Humans will be able to follow you. The best way to give someone dofollow love is allowing keyword in the anchor text. This means when you are linking to any website or page, use the targeted keyword as anchor text.
Example of Dofollow Link:
<a href=”http://www.google.com/”>Google</a>
Important Notice:-
Recently Google have said that they will still count the nofollow link as an outgoing link in terms of the distribution of page rank from your page. Though again it also depends on where that nofollow link is places. Placing a nofollow link at the bottom of the page has least impact and when placed at the top of the page, it carries some impact.
Types Of No-Follow
· Robots Meta Tag : <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />
This tells bots/crawlers/spiders not to follow links on the full page.
· Link Attribute : <a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>
This tells search engines not to count the link in terms of ranking pages.
Specially for WordPress blog, you can use Robots meta plugin to put nofollow, noindex attributes in a single blog post or complete site. If you use Thesis Theme, you can use Thesis inbuilt SEO features to put nofollow, noindex attributes.
Quick tip: Try to keep noindex attribute for pages like contact and nofollow attribute for affiliate links on your blog posts. If you are linking to any spam website for any reason, use nofollow link attribute.
