In our last blog post, we talked about the different types of backlinks for your website; including editorial links, links from social media, backlinks from images, and more. Now that you understand the different ways to get backlinks, it’s important to also know this: what is a nofollow link?
While there are many different approaches to back linking as we talked about in our previous post, there are really only two main types of backlinks. These are called nofollow links and dofollow links.
We know what you’re thinking - that’s great and all, but what is a nofollow link? What is a dofollow link? When do you use one versus the other? And these are all fantastic questions which we are about to answer right here, right now.
To make this easy, let’s start with nofollow links. Because once you understand what a dofollow link is, then it’s easier to comprehend what a nofollow link is.
Understanding what a dofollow link is is actually quite simple. A dofollow link is a link that you put on your website that links to another piece of external content. Dofollow links don’t require any specific tag in the code of the website to indicate that search engines should follow it to the source. So you know what that means? It’s just a plain ol’ URL.
Using dofollow links signals to search engines such as Google that the website you’re linking out to is related to your content, product, or services. It also signals that you believe the content is of high-authority.
Knowing this, it’s easy to comprehend why dofollow links are the most popular types of links used in back linking strategy.
On the other hand, a nofollow link is a link that has a “nofollow” tag attached to it. What does that mean? Well, it’s easier to show you what it looks like rather than try to explain it.
When using a regular link (a dofollow link) in your website’s code, it’s structured like this:
<a href=“https://www.greyphin.com/>
But nofollow links look like this:
<a href=“https://www.greyphin.com/ rel=“nofollow”>
Notice at the end of the nofollow link there’s a nofollow tag? That lets search engines like Google know that NOT to follow the link to the original source. Basically, the nofollow tag tells the search engine to ignore the link. Give that link the cold shoulder. Write it off completely. Shun it to a deserted island.
Sorry - we got a little carried away there.
In all seriousness, while there are situations in which it makes sense to use a nofollow link, attaching a nofollow tag to a URL doesn’t help your search engine optimization score because it’s not passing any link juice (or as fancier people like to call it, PageRank).
If your aim is to increase your SEO authority score, then you’ll most likely be opting for dofollow links in your content. But, there are cases for using nofollow links as well. For example, if you want to link to a piece of content that may be considered of low-authority, then you’ll probably want to use a nofollow link. Or, if someone paid you to place a link on your website, it’s SEO best practice to add a nofollow tag to that specific URL. This is because backlinks should be organic.
Now that we’ve laid it out for you, do you understand what is a nofollow link and what is a dofollow link? We hope so! But if you don’t, no worries. Contact the team at Greyphin and we’ll be happy to help you on your SEO and inbound marketing journeys.