NoFollow and DoFollow Links Explained

People often start a link building campaign without understanding the difference between Do Follow links (DoFollow links) and No Follow links (NoFollow links).

From an SEO perspective it’s very important that you understand the difference between DoFollow Link and NoFollow links as link which are considered “NoFollow” will not help you move up the search engine rankings as they don’t pass on value.

I currently use a tool called SEO Quake to check if websites where I’m looking to build links use Do Follow or No Follow links.

You can download SEO Quake free here: http://www.seoquake.com

With SEO Quake installed you can see at the click of a button whether a link is Do Follow or No Follow. Here’s an example of each type of link:

Do Follow Link
No Follow Link

If a link is Do Follow SEO Quake won’t change its appearance. If a link is No Follow however, it will.

Here’s a screenshot of this page as it looks when I’ve activated the SEO Quake plugin:

nofollow link example
As you can see, the No Follow link has a line through it so isn’t passing on any “Link Juice”.

I recommend you use SEO Quake to check if article directories and blogs allow you to get Do Follow links before put in the effort required to get the link.

No Follow and Do Follow html code

For those of you interested in what actually makes a link become DoFollow or NoFollow, check out the html code which is behind each of the above links:

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink” target=”_blank”>Do Follow Link</a>
<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow” rel=”nofollow”>No Follow Link</a>

Can you see the rel=”nofollow” in the second line of html code above? This is what makes a link become a NoFollow link.

© 2011 Internet Marketing Strategies. All rights reserved.
Real Time Web Analytics