What are Dofollow and Nofollow Links

One of the most important things internet marketers or webmasters need to know about if they are creating and building backlinks to boost up their SEO is the difference between Dofollow and Nofollow links. You may be wasting your time doing so many blog commenting or adding links to your site if all of those links are Nofollow links. But what is Nofollow?


Nofollow is an HTML attribute that we add in our hyperlinks to tell Google not to distribute any pagerank value to the page you link. The attribute also tells Google in its language which means "Don't follow this specific link" or "Don't follow links on this page". It was first created by Google in 2005 in order to combat keyword spam. In order to enhance their search rank, webmasters, marketers and spammers always look for Dofollow websites and blogs for target to leave keyword links with their choice of anchor texts. Other search engines like MSN Live and Yahoo both respect the nofollow attribute as well. When you create a link within your blog, or whithin your article content or it’s on your sidebar, the html code will be similar to this below:

<a href=”http://www.sadhycia2.blogspot.com”>This is my blog</a>

If a link is set to nofollow, it then will look similar like this:

<a href=”http://www.sadhycia2.blogspot.com” rel=”nofollow”>This is my blog</a>

If you take out the ‘nofollow’ tag, the link will become Dofollow. There is no actual DoFollow tag. Every link without the Nofollow attribute is considered as a Dofollow link.

There are various reasons why good websites want to make their links a “nofollow” links:

• If you have a webpage with a good pagerank and it links to a site which does not have any pagerank at all, then the link will cause damage to your page. To avoid this, webmasters normally set their link to Nofollow because the search engines will not acknowledge links that are Nofollow.
• Many affiliate links are also set to Nofollow by many webmasters because they think that there’s no point in passing a pagerank to it.
• Google also suggests using Nofollow tag for paid links and untrusted content. Make sure text link ads are tagged as Nofollow.
• Sending page rank juice to pages like Contact Us, About Us, Privacy Policy and Disclaimer etc are also not recommended.

How to find out whether links are Dofollow or Nofollow