Link building is a common and very useful SEO strategy that can help boost your overall website rankings while building good brand reputation. Although link building can be successful when done the right way, what many people don’t know is that not all links are created equal. Backlinks can come in different forms with the most popular being a dofollow backlink and a nofollow link. But what’s the difference between the two and how does it help you long term? This guide will give you insight into what dofollow and nofollow links are and why each one can help you.
What Is A Dofollow Link?
A dofollow link is a link which provides SEO link juice which can help to boost the pagerank of the site that it’s linked to. This means the website then goes higher in search engine page results.
To understand why this type of link works we need to look into how Google and other search engines work. When a website gets an inbound link (hyperlink) pointing to the page it receives an SEO boost. In turn the more small SEO boosts you have to your website, the better long term ranking your website will have.
The reason why you receive an SEO boost is because Google takes notice of a page, the amount of inbound links and the types of websites that they’re coming from. If Google sees a lot of genuine links coming from a certain page, then it classes that as a great page and thus will give preference to rank that website a lot higher. Overall dofollow links help with indexing a webpage more effectively.
Benefits Of Dofollow Links To Your Outreach Campaigns
Dofollow backlinks have been given some backlash with Google guidelines but even though Google may have heavy restrictions when it comes to dofollow links, when achieved they still provide some great benefits when link building. Here are some of those benefits below:
What Is A Nofollow Link?
A Nofollow link is a link which doesn’t provide link juice and one which doesn’t add any SEO boost to your website, page rank, or search engine ranking. Nofollow links generally feature a nofollow tag against the link. This pretty much signals to Google and other search engines to not count this as a point against SEO efforts. So what are the benefits of nofollow links?
Benefits Of Nofollow Links To Your Outreach Campaigns
While a nofollow link isn’t as good as a dofollow link, it doesn’t mean it comes without any benefits. There’s quite a few small benefits to a nofollow link, and some of the main ones are as followed:
How To Make The Most Of Nofollow Links
How To Check For A Dofollow and NoFollow Link
Now comes the best part and one of the biggest questions, how do you know if it’s a dofollow or nofollow link? You can simply check by following these simple instruction.
Load the page with the backlink that you want to check.
Right click on the page and click on ‘View Page Source’
When loaded press Ctrl + F and type in the beginning of your backlink name.
Once you find your link, check the details after the link. If it says rel = nofollow, this means it’s a nofollow link. If it’s rel = dofollow, it means it’s a dofollow link. This is an example of a nofollow link.
There are on occasion when a link will have neither written, in cases like this as long as it doesn’t say nofollow, it’s safe to say that it will count to your backlink link juice efforts. This screenshot below is a good example of this:
Conclusion
When it comes to dofollow and nofollow links there’s some difference and many benefits attached with them. Which one you choose is entirely up to you, but either way you’ll be able to help get your foot in the door to bringing more brand awareness to your business, website, or company. Good luck with your link building efforts.
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