What is dofollow and nofollow?

This is a question that is not an easy one to answer without first providing you with a bit of background, so here is an explanation that will hopefully help you to understand these terms.

The goal of many internet marketers, especially those who focus on natural search, is to get good quality backlinks to their site.

So what is a backlink?:

Firstly, backlinks are also known by different names and inlinks or inbound links are other common terms.

It really doesn’t matter if this doesn’t make sense just yet, all you really need to know is that a backlink is any link from another website to your website.

Why are backlinks important?

Having good quality backlinks coming into your website can make a great deal of difference in how well your site is ranked in Google. This is the reason why many internet marketers put a lot of work into getting plenty of good quality, relevant backlinks because they know what a difference this will make in how well their website ranks in Google.

Unfortunately this process is open to abuse as webmasters go out of their way to grab as many backlinks as they can get, including ones that aren’t relevant to their site and could even be considered as just spam. Google became aware of this problem and in 2005 introduced the nofollow tag. What this did was effectively stop search engines from giving any credit to a link that had the nofollow attribute.

So how does the nofollow tag work?

Say for instance you were creating a link to my blog from your website. This is the code you would use:

<a href=”https://www.probloghq.com/”> Affiliate Blog Online</a>

And it would create the following link: Affiliate Blog Online

With the nofollow tag the code would look like this:

<a href=”https://www.probloghq.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Affiliate Blog Online</a>

Notice the addition of rel=”nofollow”. Although it has the bit of extra code the link would still look the same, like this: Affiliate Blog Online. So although you can’t tell the difference by looking at the link itself, the code behind it is telling the search engines that they shouldn’t give any juice to that link.

You will find the nofollow tag is standard on most of the major blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress and Typepad. This helps to prevent comment spam although we personally still get a huge amount of spam so I’m not sure it has done the job it was originally intended to do.

So how does the dofollow tag work?

In effect, dofollow is the opposite of nofollow – in other words, the search engines do give credit to the link.

To create a dofollow link the following code would be used:

<a href=”https://www.probloghq.com/”> Affiliate Blog Online</a>

But hang on a minute, is this right? You are probably wondering where the dofollow attribute is in that piece of code. Well there is no actual dofollow tag. It is just a term used to describe the opposite of nofollow.

So when you see the term ‘dofollow blog’ it just means that the blog has removed the nofollow attribute. So if you posted a comment on that blog then the link to your website would be given credit by Google and the other search engines.

Dofollow Plugins

To turn your blog into a dofollow blog you can download a plugin that removes the nofollow attribute from automatically attaching itself to comments left on your blog.

Andy Beard has put together a comprehensive list of dofollow plugins on his site so check it out.

You can also join the No Nofollow community at Bumpzee if you really feel strongly about this issue.

The benefit of creating a dofollow blog is that it encourages people to leave commments but on the other hand it can also encourage even more spam. Just ensure that you have the Akismet Plugin installed to help combat spam.

​Sign up to ​the News​letter

​I've got nothing to give you but good advice, tips, hints and valuable information on how you can become a better blogger.

SIGN UP