DoFollow or NoFollow

DoFollow or NoFollow?

DoFollow is simply an internet jargon term given to web pages or sites that are not utilizing NoFollow. From WikiPedia: “nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring.” Originally created to help the blogging community reduce the number of inserted links into a “comment” area of a blog page, the attribute is typically standard in blog comments. It helps overwhelmed webmasters disallow spammers from gaining any kind of advantage by inserting an unwanted link on a popular page.

Persuant to the implementation of NoFollow link building has taken a massive hit, as many sites including Wikis, social bookmarking sites, corporate and private blogs, commenting plugins and many other applets across the internet began carrying out NoFollow. This made link building difficult for both honest people and spammers alike.

There’s nothing wrong with getting NoFollow links. In fact, you’ll want to get an equal amount of them as well. While they don’t overtake on link juice, they do help associate your site with anchor text (the keyword phrase that makes up the URL pointing to your site).

Search engines each interpret NoFollow in their own way. Here’s a list of the major search engines, and their actions when a NoFollow link is seen:

Google follows NoFollow links but simply does not pass on credit to an outbound link that is tagged with the attribute.
Yahoo follows NoFollow links and excludes the link from all ranking calculations.
MSN may or may not follow a NoFollow link, but it does exclude it from ranking calculations.
Ask.com does not adhere to NoFollow.

And remember- Google and other search engines are rather smart these days. If you have numerous links pointing to a page from one DoFollow source, or if that source is also linking to other places that are giving you backlinks (such as your Blogspot or Wordpress account), search engines will notice and may devalue your links to the point where they become worthless.

How to check DoFolow links? The best tool you can use to determine if these links are dofollow or not is a tiny Firefox plug-in called ‘NoDoFollow‘( check your Firefox browser if this plug-in is already installed-check the drop-down list in the ‘tools’ menu.If not yet, you can download it-free and easy). This will make checking the links a lot easier.

By just enabling the ‘NoDofollow’ plug-in, you can see links highlighted in different colors which signify dofollow or nofollow links. Those links highlighted in blue are the ‘dofollow’. Otherwise, links are ‘nofollow’-check out the illustration which shows a page having dofollow links.