Those who are new to the world of SEO may be wondering what “Do Follow vs No Follow Links” actually means. This can be confusing, but it doesn’t have to. All the confusion is about to be cleared up. If you are dealing with SEO, it is important to understand these HTML tags so that you can use them to your advantage to boost your website’s performance. Knowing when to use or not use any of these HTML tags is a crucial part of the SEO. This is why you should consult with an agency that provides an seo audit and analysis. But to just get an idea, below is the difference between do-follow and no-follow links and their role in SEO.
Do Follow Link
To be able to differentiate between the two, we’re going to look at each one independently. Getting an inbound link gives the page a small SEO boost. Look at a link as a point, so the more the links the more the points. Google considers these points and uses them to rank a page. If a page has several inbound links, Google thinks the page must be very important and many people must find it valuable. Therefore, the page is given more preference in Google’s search engine when people search for similar topics and delivers the page first to search engine users.
PageRank is Google’s metric created to help calculate the link points. In this regard, follow links are links counted as points, which push SEO link juice and help to boost the page rank of linked-to sites. This helps to rank them higher in the search engine result pages.
No Follow Link
Unlike a follow link, a no-follow link does not count as a point and does not work in the web page’s favor; therefore, PageRank is not boosted and does not favorably place the page in the SERPs. To create a no-follow link, use the no-follow link in the HTML tag. Here’s an example of a no-follow link.
<a href= “http://www.yourwebsite.com/” rel= “nofollow” >Link Text </a>
When you use the no-follow tag, you’re basically telling the search engines to not count it. You may be wondering why one would create a link and add a no-follow tag. There is a good reason for that. Spammers post irrelevant links to the comment section in blogs and forums. WordPress automatically applies the “no follow” link attribute to any user-submitted links. Wikipedia also assigns the same to links in the reference section. Blog comment spamming is still very common and the no-follow attribute helps to dampen it. So, it belongs to comments, forums, and paid links. However, note that some webmasters disable this attribute to reward blog commenters for their contribution to the blogging community and other forms of online discussion. However, if you run a blog, it is up to you to decide whether to use the no-follow attribute on your website.
Now that you’ve known the difference between do-follow and no-follow links, you can use them at your own discretion. This can be very helpful in SEO as you can determine which links you don’t want search engines to follow or recognize. This is especially important if you’re running a blog with the comment section where users post comments and other links. You can hire an SEO expert to help you decide when to use do-follow or no-follow links.
