As a newbie to the link building world you’ve probably coming across a lot of technical jargon and acronyms you don’t yet understand. In this post I will teach you the meanings of the words dofollow and nofollow, and how these terms affect us link builders.

First dofollow and nofollow are both relations (REL) described by the hyperlink.

Here are some examples:

Standard link: <a href=”www.adityavyas.com”>

Nofollow link: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”www.adityavyas.com”>

Technically there is no such thing as dofollow, it just means the absence of nofollow, by referring to it as dofollow its a lot easier to for others to understand what we’re talking about.

So what’s the difference?

Basically when a spider is crawling a page, they come across a link, and then crawl the link. By using the ‘nofollow’ relationship in the hyperlink you are telling the spider not to follow the link. Pretty simple eh?

Why wouldn’t I want a link to be crawled?

As we discussed in the previous chapter, each ofwebpage has a certain amount of PageRank so-to speak, by linking out to other web pages the traditional way you are leaking some of your PageRank to them, or in other words, sharing your pages hard-earned PageRank with another page. By utilizing the ‘nofollow’ tag you are preventing the spiders from crawling the links, and essentially keeping your PageRank within your own page, this may seem a greedy alternative but there are actually valid reasons for using the ‘nofollow’ tag.

Quick Tip – Sites which use nofollow on all outgoing links are referred to as ‘PageRank Black holes’

Where is nofollow useful?

Blog comments – Considering there are high PageRank blogs on almost all topics, blogs have become a prime target for spammers. Usually the owner can just moderate and delete these spam comments, but as some blogs are receiving hundreds of spam comments a day it becomes harder and harder to find the time to moderate them. By using the ‘nofollow’ tag on the comment section of your blog, spammers are much less likely to spam you, as it produces no gain for them in terms of PageRank.

Social Networks – If you find yourself leaving links to social networks on your pages a lot, hoping for someone to vote your story up, chances are you are leaking a lot of PageRank to these networks. The larger networks such as Digg and StumbleUpon already have a very high PageRank it probably won’t matter to them if you use the ‘nofollow’ tag.

Paid Links – Google seem to be cracking down more and more on paid links.

- Aditya Vyas

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Tags: Backlinks, DoFollow, Link Building, NoFollow

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