that seems to crop up a lot is on the whole “do follow vs no follow” and “what’s the difference between the two?” subject. I thought it was about time I put a post together letting you all know I get sent quite a few questions from readers (which I’m always happy to answer), but one question what the difference is and when/where you should use them on your site.
What’s A Do Follow Link?
In order to understand the difference between do follow vs no follow links, we need to look at how the search engines work. Search engines, like Google, are always looking for clues on which pages are the best to feature at the top of their search result pages (SERPs). One of the things that they look at is the number of links from other sites that “point” to that page.
For example, let’s say that there are two posts on a similar subject on separate sites. Both posts are of a high quality, well presented and full of useful information. However, one of these posts has hundreds of natural links “pointing” to it from external sites, whereas the other only has one or two. In this instance, the search engine would place a higher emphasis on the post with lots of links, as it would seem lots of people like it enough to link to it.
Links that “point” to another site is called do follow links. These pass link juice to a page, help to increase its PageRank and raise its profile to the search engines. The more natural do follow links a website/page has, the higher it is likely to rank online.
Think of do follow links as signposts on the internet highway. They are clearly directing people and search engines to another site.
What’s A No Follow Link?
A no follows link is a link that doesn’t “point” to another site (no signposts). I think this is where people get confused, as people can still click onto a no follow link and get sent to another site, but in the eyes of the search engines, they don’t “point” to anything.
To add a no follow a link to your site, simply add this HTML code where you want the link to appear.
1 <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”no follow”>Link Text</a>
No, follow links don’t pass any link juice, they don’t help increase PageRank and doesn’t help the site/page it’s pointing to rank any higher. Is this mean? Well no, not when you consider the alternative.
The no follows tag was introduced to help cut down on and prevent spam. You see, when people learned of the importance of links “pointing” to a site, some sites went overboard and started getting them by any means necessary. They would buy them, pay people to mass link to their site, abuse comments (by spamming their links), etc. just so they could increase their search engine ranking.
Search engines caught on to this tactic and introduced the no follow tag to help to prevent this kind of activity. Most sites now automatically add a no follow tag to any links that are posted in the comments. This greatly helps to reduce people spamming, though you will still get some people trying it.
Not only that, but search engines can heavily penalise a site for using too many do follow links that appear spammy. The aim was to cut down on this manipulation of the rankings, which seems to have worked quite well. It’s by no means perfect, as sites still try to manipulate their ranking, but on the whole, it is much better than it used to be.
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