The Branson Pro

Dofollow vs. Nofollow links.

Basically, there are two main types of links (form an SEO point-of-view): dofollow and nofollow.

Dofollowlinks have theRPs rel=nofollow attribute removed in the HTML source. When the rel=nofollow attribute is not used, it tells the spiders to follow the link and crawl the content for the site.

In most cases, you want the links to your site to be dofollow. That way, it will help build your website’s trust in Google, ultimately helping your website’s rankings.

Nofollow links are defined by have the rel=nofollow attribute set into the HTML source. When this attribute is set, it is telling the spiders to ignore the link and do not follow it to the site.

Nofollow links really do nothing for you,as far as SEO and rankings are concerned. Since it is telling the search engine spiders to ignore the link, it will NOT help to build your site’s trust or authority in Google.

Why do some webmasters use the rel=nofollow attribute? It is implemented for many reasons. But primarily to reduce or deter the amount of link spam on their site.

Link spam is the act of spamming a blog or forum with junk links. For instance, many link spammers will saturate a website with adult-oriented, online pharmacy, or other objectional content links.  Many black hat SEOs do this to try and boost a website’s rankings buy spamming another site with as many links as possible. Not only is this a major annoyance, it can also be very time consuming to edit / remove all of these spam links. And if your website is linking to a spam site (even inadvertently), Google will actually penalize your site for linking to a “bad neighbor”.

By using the rel=nofollow attribute on a blog or forum, the amount of link spam can be greatly reduced and your chances of being penalized are also reduced because you are not actually linking to the spam sites (it’s nofollowed).

(Another reason to use the nofollow attribute would be for the purpose of “Page Rank Sculpting“, which we will discuss in a later post)

Many SEO pros will argue this fact and say that nofollow links are counted in Google because they are listed in your links under the Google Webmaster Tools panel. And while they are listed there, Google makes it very clear that they are not counted and therefore do not help your website for SEO purposes. Google is aware of them, but don’t pay attention to them. Make sense?

To further illustrate this fact, here is a video from the blog of Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s webspam team):

It’s important to build your links on sites that dofollow. Otherwise, you are not going to help boost your website’s rankings.