Dofollow vs. Nofollow Backlinks

Dofollow vs.Nofollow Backlinks. SEO was a bit disorganized and messy before getting familiar with nofollow and dofollow backlinks. And the vast majority of webmasters were exposed to several severe issues while improving their website ranking, such as bans, penalties, spam, etc. With the current progress in the Internet globe, creating and maintaining a successful website has become somewhat challenging. In fact, 65% of marketers consider link building the most challenging but crucial step in SEO. And before you start learning about dofollow vs. nofollow backlinks. It is also essential to learn about the benefits of backlinks, the connection between backlinks and SEO, what do backlinks do for your website, and how to protect your site from malicious backlinks. So, seobase will dedicate this article to explaining the difference between the dofollow vs. nofollow backlinks:

What is a Dofollow Backlink?

A dofollow backlink meaning is an internal and/or external link that points to a website and enable search spiders to follow them and enter your site to indexing pages. It also helps by passing the website origin authority to the destination site. This authority passing is called "link juice."   The dofollow backlink is very effective in SEO and is a double-edged sword. Either it will benefit or harm your site, which is definitely due to the backlinks' source. You can notice that this type of link contains the hashtag "rel=" dofollow" in the link. Unlimited links also count as a dofollow backlink. In addition, building a dofollow backlink helps improve a website's domain authority (DA) or rating, which helps to improve keyword ranking.

What is a Nofollow Backlink?

A nofollow backlink, we can define as a link that points to your site but does not allow search spiders to track them and crawl your site. Therefore, it does not affect the site's ranking, but it raises the PageRank of the page pointed to on your site. Thus, these links do not help in terms of SEO. However, it is also a traffic source for visitors to the site. It doesn't pass authority on to the website it is linking to. A nofollow link contains the hashtag "rel=" nofollow.

When Should a Nofollow Backlink Be Used?

In September 2019, Google declared two new link attributes that offered webmasters extra ways to help Google identify the different links nature. So, many webmasters ask are nofollow links worth anything. It would help if you used a nofollow backlink on a website in these cases:

• You don't want to pass link juice. 
• You endorse the linked website.

In 2005, Google introduced nofollow links to combat web spam. An HTML nofollow link attribute prevents a paid link from influencing Google Pagerank. In addition, Google tells you to use rel=" sponsored" or rel=" nofollow" link for paid links and rel=" ugc" or rel=" nofollow" for user-generated content links. In comparing dofollow vs. nofollow Backlinks, a site that does not contain nofollow links is a warning to the search engine that there is something wrong with it, such as spam or the like. As sites usually acquire nofollow links naturally. 

So, are nofollow links bad? 

The nofollow backlink may not be very useful for your SEO strategy, but it is not bad. Now, we can identify several points that indicate the benefits of the nofollow links:

• The nofollow link doesn’t pass your website page authority to others website.
• It doesn’t link your website with banned websites.
• It is an excellent traffic and visitors’ source. 
• Raise your website PageRank.

How to Tell if a Link is Dofollow or Nofollow?

There are several ways to verify nofollow and dofollow links; seobase will mention two of them:

First method to identify the dofollow vs. nofollow Backlinks:

Right-click on the link and click on "Inspect Element," It will show you the backlink HTML icon. Then you can check the rel attribute and select the link type.

Second method to identify the dofollow vs. nofollow Backlinks:

Right-click on the web page and click on "View page source." Then find the link you left in the source code, press Ctrl + F and search for the website's name or your comment. You will find the source code for the link. Now you can see if your comment is a dofollow link or nofollow link. You can also set up a list of blogs that give you a nofollow link when you comment. See SEO Site Audit Checklist for 2022 

Conclusion

Webmasters should aim to build quality dofollow links. The easiest and most effective way is to search for websites that have mentioned your site or brand in their content.  As for noflow links, it's a bit more complicated. You can use the seobase backlink checker tool to check the backlinks linked with your site. There are many practices to create nofollow and dofollow links. The practices change and evolve according to Google algorithms. You can use the seobase online SEO toolset to improve your website SEO strategy. See Creative ways to Build Backlinks