What is the Difference Between Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks

Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks can confuse people. The links all look the same if you are just surfing the web but there is a big difference between them to the Google Search Engine. Google intended the nofollow tag to be a spam-busting device. The basic idea is that adding the nofollow tag to a link simply makes it invisible to search engines. The links do not pass page rank and the search engine spiders do not follow them at all.

Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks

There is no such thing as a dofollow link. Webmasters coined the term to refer to regular links that do not use the ref=nofollow tag. The understanding that a website needs links that send page rank in order to rank, means that when webmasters look for links they want solid dofollow links.

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There are a couple ways to find out if a link is followed or not. People can look at the source code of a website and hunt for the phrase nofollow. This method works great but can be time consuming and certain types of nofollow links may not show up. Many people have chosen to use browsers that allow users to modify them. The Firefox browser is popular among professional internet marketers for the SEO tools that it contains. One such tool is the NoFollow add-on. This marks links pink or blue depending on whether or not they will be followed by the search engines. Using such an add-on, will cut down on the time required to determine whether a websites links are followed.

Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks

Although nofollow probably sounded great in theory, in reality it has not worked out quite the way the spam team intended. Websites began nofollowing links to hoard page rank. They started nofollow links within their own site to pagerank sculpt their site. PR Sculpting is deliberately sending PR only to the most important pages on a website. The sudden massive use of the ref=nofollow tag began to cause problems with Google itself. The spiders were having a hard time indexing the internet because of the regular and repetitive use of nofollow for no reason.

Webmasters should use the nofollow tag when linking to an external website that they do not trust. It should be used internally to privacy pages, terms of use and other pages that do not need search engine traffic.

Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks

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