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:

• SEO Boost: Great content, along with a dofollow link, on a high quality website can really help you to boost your website ranking and SEO efforts. The more dofollow backlinks you build in a healthy way, the more traffic it will bring to your website and the more you’ll outrank your competition.
• Indexing Is Quicker: Dofollow links are able to be crawled and indexed by Google faster which allows for quicker indexing of your website or content. This is why it’s ideal to try to build dofollow links using White Hat link building methods.  
• More Exposure: Dofollow links have the ability to give more exposure to your website or blog, this is due to the help it gives you by giving you an SEO boost in search engine rankings. With a dofollow link, you have more opportunities for your content and website to be discovered.
• Longer Lasting SEO Benefits – Dofollow backlinks have the ability to provide long lasting SEO benefits over nofollow link. This is because the link juice can continue for years as long as the dofollow link stays active. It’s always good however to check the website’s quality each year to ensure it’s still a great site that provides value towards your website.

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:

• Refer Traffic To Your Site – Nofollow links, while they don’t provide link juice, they do provide website traffic the ability to click through to your website. What this means is that the more nofollow links you have leading back to your website, the more potential you’ll have to have increased traffic flow. This in itself is good as Google will still look at this as a factor when it comes to ranking your website which is a win/win for you.
• Increases Brand Awareness – Nofollow link are also good to help you increase brand awareness because it allows you to still get your name out there. Even without the link juice, you still have opportunities to tell the world about your brand through your blogging efforts and author bio. This can help to generate more popularity over a long period of time.
• Could Help Improve Profit – Nofollow links also have the potential to help you to increase your profits long term as more and more people click through to your website. The more people on your website the more potential you’ll have that someone will buy a product from you.

How To Make The Most Of Nofollow Links

• Encourage People To Click On Them – Changing the language of how you write your nofollow link into your content can help encourage more links. Instead of saying something like ‘find more information here’, try ‘look at this cool way you can improve your rankings here’. Language is everything if you want to motivate people to click on your links.
• Gain A Larger Audience – This won’t be easy to start with but start engaging and setting up social media accounts to interact with followers. The more you interact in a positive way, the more audience you’ll gain. The more audience you gain the more you’ll have a chance of using nofollow links to send people back to your website.
• Make Your Link Relevant – There’s nothing worse than clicking on a hyperlinked anchor to a keyword your interested in and then it leads you to somewhere else. Always make sure the link is relevant to the content and to the anchor it’s attached to.

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.