What is Do-follow and No-follow links, dofollow, nofollow

If you’ve been doing any kind of reading about link building, then you’ve probably seen people mentioning “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. But, to the person who is new to all of this, it may be kind of confusing. I am going to help break it down for you.

No-Follow

Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.

Example

<a href="http://www.askbangladesh.com/" rel="nofollow">Software list</a>

What nofollow is not for

The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content, or for preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders from accessing content on a website or for preventing them from including the content of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on-page Meta Elements that are designed to specify on an individual page level what a search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page

What are “Do Follow” blogs?

“Do follow” is the opposite of “No-Follow”. Wordpress blogs, by default, use the HTML nofollow attribute on links that point away from the blog. This no follow attribute comes into play with the posting of blog comments. The no-follow tag tells the search engines NOT to follow the link to any other web sites.

The logic behind using no follow is, it’s good for the blog since there will be fewer outgoing links and therefore less “link bleed”, leading to better Google page rank. Sounds good!

Using no follow also makes sense because there are blog spammers out there who will, and have, posted blog spam comments solely for the benefit of getting more incoming links to their site, which helps page rank. That makes sense!

Do Follow blogs are going against the norm and turning the No-Follow tag off, enabling do-follow of out going comment links.

Why Go Do-Follow?

If you’re like me, you want people to comment on your blog posts. You want more of an interactive community. That’s what Web 2.0 is about – community, relationships, and user created content.

But, how do you encourage people to comment on your blog posts? You give them something in return. You give them an outgoing link to their website, when they make a quality comment on your blog. You also allow the search engine to follow that link to their website by using the do follow attribute.

You also need to let people know that you are a Do Follow Blog. Some visitors will have no idea what that means, but those who do know what it means will appreciate it and will often leave a comment.