Should You Care About Do Follow and No Follow Links?

For common internet users, links are all the same. They’re something you click on that will lead you to other places on the internet. To those familiar with SEO, there are two types of links: internal and external links. Internal links are links that lead to other pages in the same website while external links are those that lead you to web pages on other websites.

But for those that are new to working with SEO, there are two further types of links: follow links (dofollow) and no follow (nofollow) links. Before we can define both of these links, we need to understand first how links work in the world of SEO.

How Do Links Work in SEO?

When pages get inbound links from other sites, they get a small boost in their SEO, which is an indicator that other sites consider the site an authority, increasing the site’s positioning. Think of it as getting more points each time a site links to your own. Google then keeps the score – it tracks the amount of points that you have. If you have a lot of points, Google thinks you must be a really good page because of its high score. So it gives preferential treatment to that specific page in searches because it only shows the best pages to their users.

Now that we know how links work and are computed, we can define the types of links.

 

What are Follow Links?

Follow links are links that are counted towards your “page score”. They allow search engines to follow them and reach the website, helping the website to go higher in the search engine results page as a result. All links are dofollow by default so you do not have to do anything to make a link into a dofollow.

An example of a dofollow link:

<a href=”http://thisismywebsite.com/”> My Website </a>

 

What are NoFollow Links?

Contrary to the nature of follow links, no follow links do not count towards the “total score” of a page. They do not boost a site’s page rank and does not help in a page’s placement in the search engine results page. They make use of the “nofollow” meta tag to turn the link into a nofollow.

There are actually two types of nofollow links. They can:

  • tell bots/spiders/crawlers not to follow all the links on a specific page through a robots meta tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

  • tell search engines not to count the link in terms of ranking pages.

<a href=”http://thisismywebsite.com/” rel=”nofollow”>

 

How Can These Links Help My Business?

The benefits of dofollow links are very obvious as they help increase your site’s ranking and position within the search engine results page. The nofollow links are actually more helpful than you think. They help decrease the occurrence of spam. They also help increase your visibility (social media links are nofollow).

The type of link really shouldn’t matter much on a bigger perspective. What builds your brand is not the type of links that are good for SEO, but which links can help establish you as an authority in the industry.