So you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. This difference is very important to understand when trying to build links back to your website.
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When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.
Another commonly used HTML tag that tells the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website is the rel=”nofollow” tag. By default, when not specified the link will be a do follow link, but if the rel=”nofollow” attribute then the search engine spiders will treat the link in a different way. In away the no follow tag tells the spiders not to follow this link, and to just ignore it.
Now you just might be as why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my page, and this would be a very valid question.
Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site? (Or, Why would I use “nofollow”?)
A couple reasons why you might use the “nofollow” tag:
1) If you are adding paid links to your site Google recommend using the no follow attribute. This is because effectively each time you add a link on your website you are passing on (and giving away) a small amount of “link juice” to the page you are linking to. Google don’t really like paid links as it tricks their page rank system.
2) Often people will choose to use the no follow on their blog’s comments section. In this instance people are worried that their site will get spammed and all their precious “link juice” will drain from there site to other sites pages. In deed this can be a problem, but as I am sure we all know the best blog are always DO FOLLOW (see my comments below), if you blog receives a good comment then the least you can do is give a little back to the commenter – after all they are contributing to you websites content . Besides, because dofollw links are more desirable, blogs that offer dofollow comments are more likely to get more comments and because of this a generally better moderated – so are better blogs. But at the end of the day it up to you want your commentators to get a do follow link back to their site or not.
Why do, dofollow matter?
If you are building links for the purposes of increasing page rank you may wish to determine if the websites you are attempting to get links from are using the “nofollow” tag or not. If they are then you need to consider if you want to use your time creating a link on a website that will not pass on any “link juice”. Having said that there is more to SEO than page rank, but that issue is for another day.
When looking for sites and blogs that you could leave your link on, try to figure out if the links on the site uses the “nofollow” tag or not.
How to tell if a site uses the “no follow” attribute.
1. Find the section of the site where you link will be posted.
2. Try to find a link that has been left by somebody else. Then left click and drag you mouse over the link so that it becomes highlighted.
3. Move your mouse so that the pointer is over the highlighted text and right click, from the menu select “View source selection” or the closest appropriate option.
4. This will open a new tab or window where you will see some text. This text is the HTML source code behind the page you were looking at. In the highlighted text if you see rel=”nofollow” or rel=”external nofollow” then the link has a no follow attribute.
2. Try to find a link that has been left by somebody else. Then left click and drag you mouse over the link so that it becomes highlighted.
4. This will open a new tab or window where you will see some text. This text is the HTML source code behind the page you were looking at. In the highlighted text if you see rel=”nofollow” or rel=”external nofollow” then the link has a no follow attribute.
Where are all the do follow links?
It the next logical question really and there is no simple answer, to be honest you have to use you initiative. You can start with blogs and directories, perhaps even some of the social bookmarking sites. One thing for sure is it is a long process and there is no simple solution, but remember there are ways to use you time more efficiently such as blog searching software and dofollow search engines. Here are a few URLs to get you started:
www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver
dofollow.radpixels.com/
dofollowsearchengine.com/
www.dofollow.net
dofollow.radpixels.com/
dofollowsearchengine.com/
www.dofollow.net
All the best,
Jon
SEO Birmingham
