Wait, What About Dofollow Links?
Good for you, you noticed I have not even talked about dofollow links. There is very good reason for this.
A lot of people know a little bit about backlinking and it certainly true that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. These people tend to concentrate very heavily on only acquiring dofollow links and totally forget that nofollow links are needed to. If you over optimize your linking portfolio, then Google treats this in much the same way as over optimized content or backlinks. It flags it as unnatural and penalizes you in one way or another. For backlinks this takes the form of de-indexed links. Resulting in your once 10,000 strong backlinking collection, being whittled down to nothing. And so your Google ranking drops heavily, closely followed by traffic. Ergo, I have not mentioned dofollow tags until now in the hope of saving you from yourself.
Time to learn all about dofollow links, nofollow links, pagerank and what Google likes in terms of your backlinking profile.
What Are Dofollow Links?
The short answer is.
Dofollow links do not exisit.
I know that sounds pretty silly, especially considering all the buzz about dofollow links and dofollow backlinks, but its true. There is no such things a dofollow tag. What people call dofollow links are actually normal links that do not possess the nofollow rel tag
So what does this odd sounding link look like? Well lets look at an example:
Notice that this link does not contain anything that remotely looks like “dofollow”. Now lets compare the same link to its’ nofollow counterpart:
This link contains rel=”nofollow” and this lets the search engine bots thats this link is nofollow. But the besides the obvious lack of some additional characters, what are the real application differences between these two links?
What Do Dofollow Links Actually Do?
To answer this question we really to first take a look at what nofollow links do and dont do. Wikipedia describes a nofollow link as; a link that instructs some search engines to not accredit any ranking influence to the links’ target. Which basically means, nofollow links are intended as a means of linking two pages or sites without any link juice being passed down the link. This system of controlling the flow of link juice was created as a method of moderating search engine results and preventing Google and other search engines returning unrelated results for search terms.
Ok, so know we know a little about nofollow links, but one thing might have stood out in the above explanation; nofollow links only apply to some search engines. And before we move onto explaining dofollow links we should really examine this statement. Below is a tabbed break down of how the top search engines treat nofollow links:
Google follows the link but does not use the link to index the page, unless the page has previously been indexed. And most importantly Google does not include the link in the calculations of pagerank.
Yahoo follows the link and uses the information to index the target page. But like Google, Yahoo does not utilize the link in ranking calculations
Bing does not use the link in rank calculations and it is unclear if it follows these link
Great, now we know what nofollow links do and why they are important. So if we strip out the nofollow rel tag and turn our nofollow link into a dofollow link, what changes occur?
Google follows the link and indexes the target. The link is also taken into consideration when calculating search rankings and pagerank.
Yahoo follows the link and uses the information to index the target page. The link is also used in ranking calculations
Bing follows and indexes according to the links and utilizes the link in rank calculations
For a lot of people the above mention of pageranking has just set off various bells and whistles. The connection between dofollow links and pagerank is indisputable. And this connection and its resultant effects are the driving force behind an enormous industry. But what is all the hype about and why should I care?
SEO Training – What Are Dofollow Links originally appeared on Smuggecko on July 15, 2012.
