SEO Tips : Dofollow and Nofollow links Explained

If you are new to linkbuilding and try to research on the web you will be able to see these two keywords “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings.

When creating a link on a webpage using HTML, the standard code for that link is:

<a href=”http://www.lazyjon.com/”>SEO Techniques</a>

The above code will output like this :

SEO Techniques

Basically the code above is the dofollow link which in reality are the normal links.
Search Engine Spiders will be crawling this link at your page.
In order to tell the search engine spiders not to crawl this link “NoFollow” is being used.

Here is an example of NoFollow link:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.lazyjon.com/”>SEO Techniques</a>

It would then look like:

SEO Techniques

How these things important to Search Engine Rankings?

In order to build links on other websites (to increase your search engine rankings), you need to determine if the websites you are attempting to get your site listed on use the “nofollow” tag or not. If the site is “Nofollow” search engines don’t follow that link and you don’t get any increase in search engine rankings from that link. Because it is important when you are looking for sites and blogs that you could leave your link on (through reciprocal links, commenting on a blog, directory submissions, buying links, etc).

Why would I use “Nofollow” if “Dofollow” is important to Search Engine Rankings?

There are many reasons you would want to use the “nofollow” tag, such as:
1) Paid Links: This is recommended by Google. Essentially, your sites page rank give a small amount of rank juice to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking, which is the purpose of link building, to get that juice from others). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that.

2) Maybe in your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link juice back to their site. It is personal preference.

3) When linking to major, very popular sites. If you are linking to google.com, yahoo.com, digg.com (the front page), cnn.com, or whoever else, they are already popular, so you might as well use “nofollow” since your link won’t make or break them.