What are dofollow and nofollow links?

[Dimaeiya333]

In the chaotic world of links that is today's web, there are some technical nuances that are invisible to the user. However, it is these details that have a huge impact on how search engines perceive links .

Two decades ago, search engines followed every link they found. But the emergence of comment spam changed this forever, giving rise to a series of technical solutions that are still in use today.

When a website links to another website, there are two ways to do it, with dofollow links and nofollow links . While both types of links accomplish the same goal of linking from the original site to the target site, they tell the search engine two different things.

It’s all about “link juice”
Link juice is a term used in the SEO world that refers to the amount of authority or value that one website transmits to another through external links, or backlinks .

In general, the more link juice a page receives, the more likely it is to rank for its keywords in Google and other search engines.

Links from websites with higher authority and relevance to a topic will generate more link juice and help a page rank higher in search results. But what if we want to control the flow of this “link juice”?

dofollow and no follow links
dofollow links vs. nofollow links
To the average user, dofollow and nofollow links look exactly the same. Strictly speaking, there are no dofollow links . This is simply the default state of a link, so a dofollow link is, in fact, a normal link.

It is given a special name to emphasize that it must meet regular expectations, i.e. passing link juice and authority to the referring sources. If other websites link to your website with normal links (i.e. dofollow ), this can have a direct impact on your search engine rankings.

However, nofollow links include a small piece of code, called an attribute, that lets search engines know not to follow the link.

A nofollow link looks like this: < a href = »URL» rel = »nofollow» > Link text </ a > and can be understood as follows: the a element ( anchor or link) has a rel attribute whose value is nofollow .

Comment spam and the origin of nofollow links
Google proposed nofollow in 2005, in response to the rise of comment lebanon mobile phone number list spam . At that time, website owners were leaving links to their sites in the comments sections of hundreds or even thousands of external websites or forums.

dofollow and no follow links
This way they ensured a better ranking in searches, which was independent of the relevance of the comment and the overall quality of their pages.

The proposal was quickly adopted by other search engines, such as Yahoo! and Bing. It quickly became one of the recommended methods for marking advertising, sponsored links, and those in third-party generated content (such as comments and wikis).

This stopped some manipulations, but did not solve all the problems with different link types and trust levels.

Where are nofollow links used?
A nofollow link should be used when you do not want to pass link juice to the linked website, or endorse it. Links to the following types of content are typically nofollow links :

Comments on blogs.
Social networks.
Forums.
External links from Wikipedia.
Press releases.
Sponsored content.
Widgets.