What is dofollow and nofollow links?

Dofollow and Nofollow Links

Dofollow and nofollow links are links that, when placed on your site, may have a link back or not. Both should be used within a content strategy as long as they follow good practices that increase their digital results.

The work done within a marketing management is focused on generating results that meet the goals of a business.

Content Marketing is one of the strategies that help bring these results. However, it is not just about creating good content, but also about adopting some practices like inserting dofollow and nofollow links.

To let you know what they are, how important they are within a content strategy (as well as SEO) and what to keep in mind when inserting these types of links into your website or blog, read on this post.

In order to begin to understand the differences between dofollow and nofollow links, we need to understand how this link building works within SEO, meaning what happens every time a website or blog gets a new link that can increase its ranking in Google.

Just as each new content on your blog increases your chances of being found by your audience (which later increases your business opportunities), we can say that each new link on your site or blog increases your chances of have more visitors and better search engine placement.

After all, Google’s algorithm, seeing so many internal and external links pointing at you, concludes that if so many people are linking to this site/blog, it should be very good and therefore deserves better placement.

Dofollow links are links that allow Google and other searchers to point back to your site or blog.

So every time you place a dofollow link on your site, it can point back to you, which strengthens your authority by showing searchers that other sites, blogs, and posts are linking to you.

For example, if Rock Content cites a dofollow Company X link on its blog, the page or blog post used in the citation will be taken into account in the ranking.

This is called by some Link Juice users and it is due to Google’s PageRank metric.

So when inserting external links into your blog, make sure they are from sites with good authority, as this will be very important for the growth of authority of your site or blog as well.

By contrast, there are those links that you can insert and not have a backlink, they are called nofollow links. They do not boost PageRank nor help in better placement on the SERP.

Sites that have nofollow links have an HTML tag similar to <a href=”https://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow> Link Text </a> . This tag serves as a warning to search engines not to consider it for the rank of the searcher.

Tools like SEMRush can show you which links are dofollow and which links are nofollow for you to consider when inserting them into your content.

But why does anyone leave their own website or blog as nofollow?

Now that you understand the difference between dofollow and nofollow links, you may be wondering what makes some companies and professionals choose to have nofollow linked websites or blogs, which is beneficial for both.

Well, what happens is this: Just as good links pointing to your domain make it better, bad links can diminish your authority over Google.

After all, just as the algorithm concludes something similar to “if so many good sites are pointing this guy, he must be good too,” he can also conclude “if so many bad sites are pointing this guy, he must also be bad and his SERP positioning needs to decrease. ”

Thus, sites that are very good certainly have nofollow links.

Here’s what points you should consider when placing links on your site or blog that can be either dofollow or nofollow.

The first step is to survey which sites you want your content to cite and which can also point you back as dofollow.

Make sure they are relevant to your post and not just there because of the link. Otherwise, search engines may consider your post spam.

Do not underestimate the algorithm, because, with each update, Google considers more content that is made for the user and not for search engines.

If information is not that relevant but you feel you need a link, choosing nofollow is better. Also make sure that ad links, affiliates, and the like are not dofollow.

To do this, use the nofollow tag every time you insert links you don’t want to be followed back. This is critical when you need to cite links from competitors, not just in terms of niche but also in keywords.

If you have a link to another website and want Google to recognize that you linked to it, use a dofollow link. This type of link is useful for search engines as it can help bots get a better idea of ​​what their content is about.

Also, mentioning other sites is also a natural thing to do with genuine content. All the time, Google is favoring text that looks natural rather than text that simply wants to rank well, even if it hurts the user experience.

Remember those texts that repeated the keywords to exhaustion and also filled the link contained in an attempt to appear in search results people do? This once worked, but today it no longer works.

So far we have talked about the differences between dofollow and nofollow links when placing them on your site or blog. But, what should be done when other websites or blogs do this to you?

Some people think that when that happens, we just have to accept them, because the more links we have, the better, right? Wrong.

While more links can have a direct impact on your domain’s search rankings, links from sites with poor authority and credibility can hurt yours. Therefore, it is recommended not to follow them back.

Don’t worry because even if the link pointed to on third-party sites is nofollow, it will still be visible to the people who visit it, thus being a source of the traffic to your site or blog.

An example of this is companies and professionals who embed their links on Wikipedia. As nofollow as it may be, the fact that the link is there can make many readers access it, increasing the number of visits which is also one of the ranking factors of Google.

This is a recurring doubt among those wishing to start doing off-page SEO actions. After all, the more trustworthy websites pointing to yours, the more relevant it will be to search engines.

The first step is to truly create the best content on any subject.

The more pertinent and useful it is to your persona, the more likely it is to be well-positioned in search results, causing other sites to point you to the subject you talk about in the content.

In terms of active actions to make this happen, a good way is to create content for third party blogs, which we call guest post. Some blogs allow others to write to them as it helps them get more content published. In return, you can insert links that point to your site in the article.

So try writing guest posts for sites that have good authority and some connection to your niche. If someone has a website about vegan food, it makes no sense to write content for, for example, a steak house.

So now that you know what to consider when inserting dofollow and nofollow links, it’s important to know how to reject negative backlinks in order to optimize your results. In this article, we explain the walkthrough of how to do this.

Scroll to Top