If you’re planning to start a career in SEO then you have to aware of these common terms such as noindex, doindex, nofollow, dofollow, meta robots, etc. In the book of SEO, these are important and most used terms. Likewise, I am writing this article to explain you the basics of SEO that are Nofollow and Dofollow SEO.

Are you aware?

In 2005, this concept was first introduced by Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen. Nofollow is an HTML attribute value utilized to inform search engines bots that hyperlink should not affect the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. Its aim is to reduce certain types of search engine spam to improve the quality of search engine results.

Understand the different between Nofollow & Dofollow Link Tags

Nofollow link tags don’t allow search engine bots to follow the link. It indicates that if you’re taking backlinks from the website in which nofollow tag is used then you’ll not get any benefit for SEO. On the other hand, it’s good to get nofollow tags from where you don’t want to pass link juice. It’s beneficial to get traffic on the website through nofollow links.

Let’s check the example of Nofollow link:

a href=”http://www.anydomain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>anydomain</a>

Dofollow links permit the Google and other search engines to follow the link and reach accordingly on the website. This can be treated as a backlink that you can count in the link juice. If the webmaster is considering those links then search engines and humans can follow you easily. One of the best ways to get dofollow backlink is by allowing the keywords in the anchor text.  In a simple way, if you are giving or taking the backlink from any website then it’s suggested to use a keyword as an anchor text.

Read: Steps to Add Nofollow Links In WordPress

Let’s check the example of Dofollow link:

<a href=”http://www.anydomain.com/”>anydomain</a>

Remember: In dofollow links, all hyperlinks are by default dofollow.

Further, Google has also stated that they will consider nofollow links as an outgoing link for distributing the page rank from your page. Again, it also depends on where that nofollow link is placed. For example, if you placed the link at the bottom of the website then it will not give that much benefit in comparison to the link placed at the top of the website.

Type of No-Follow

• Robots Meta Tag:

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

This type of URL tells bots, crawlers, spiders that not to follow the links on the full page.

• Link Attribute

<a href=”http://www.anydomain.com” rel=”nofollow”>

Here, Google gets the indication that not to crawl this link in terms of ranking pages.

 Important Tip

For pages like contact us or any other page which you don’t want to index in Google then for those pages, you can keep it noindex attribute. In case, you are linking to spam website for any reason then it’s necessary to use nofollow link attribute.

Final Word

Dofollow and Nofollow are the important terms in SEO that plays a key role in determining the website position in the search engine results. However, implementing these terms carefully will take your website to the next level in terms of performance.