Difference between Nofollow and Dofollow links
If you are new in Digital Marketing or blogging then you might hear the word nofollow and dofollow very often. It is a pretty common term between digital marketers who work towards website rankings. SEO (search engine optimization) method is almost incomplete without learning nofollow and dofollow links. Today I am going to talk more about these type of links and will share importance & benefits of nofollow and dofollow links in search engine optimization.
No follow links
These links are HTML generated links which are meant to reduce spam. I will try to explain this with one simple example. Hypothetically, you have a business which deals in services and have certain prodeucts. Imagine that a group of people are using your product or services and talking positively about it. Because of this your competitors or business rivals started talking negatively and created a myth between people about your product or services. In order to handle this situation, you would encourage your audience to ignore those rumors and concentrate on services. That’s the same we do when someone attack the website with spam links.
How to deal spam links within website?
Dealing with website spam by using nofollow links is easy. All you need to do is use attribute rel=nofollow Given below is the example.
You can see that I have added nofollow to all search terms because I don’t want search engines to crawl links generated dynamically by the search keywords. The major benefit of this practice is to reduce number of not found 404 errors. It’s because URL’s generated by search query are actually not pages and if search engines would crawl those URL’s it would give you not found errors in webmaster.
Most of the time we also use nofollow attribute rel=nofollow in comments, testimonials and review pages. Because most of the time we get the spam links, negative reviews and comments there.
How to deal with Spam backlinks?
While generating backlinks, we target the best domains with better DA/PA (Domain authority and Page Authority) but you might see some spam links targeting your website. In this situation you can follow the standard “Disavow” procedure and get rid of spam backlinks. Here is how to use Google disavow tool
Do follow links:
As it reflects, Do follow links are hyperlinks that allow search engine and humans to follow them. I’ve explained the nofollow with a hypothetical situation where you don’t want people to hear rumors by asking them ignore hoax news. It’s exactly the opposite. Do follow links are beneficial for website ranking and you allow search engines to crawl those links.
SEO Benefits of NoFollow links
Mostly this practice is to fight with spam and provide a clean and safe platform for visitors and inform the same to search engines such as google and bing. The lesser spam links on your website or towards your website creates a positive impression and help to gain better domain authority. It could help you in gaining better rankings in SERP (search engine result page).
SEO Benefits of DoFollow links
Major SEO benefit of DoFollow links is good rank. If you are providing better & safe platform for users and sharing quality information then search engine crawlers would give your website or blog a better ranking.
Pro Tip: Getting dofollow backlinks from a platform where you have full control is always good. For example social platforms such as twitter, facebook or tumblr. If you have full control then you can delete, edit or create backlinks according to you.
Hope this information of Nofollow and Dofollow links would help you to understand better about it.