Dofollow and Nofollow links
-
What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links? I know that some sites/blogs only let you post nofollow links. In such a case how do I know if a comment I posted on a certain site will be a nofollow or dofollow? How about big traffic sites such as Huff Post. Do they only allow nofollow links?
-
Dofollow letting the bot crawl the target page
-
Thank you for the help Tom!
-
dofollow links pass "SEO Juice".
nofollow links do not pass "SEO Juice".
If your curious as to whether or not a particular blog allows for dofollow links, you can view the source code of the webpage using any common web browser. Find the link in question, and look to see if it includes "rel=nofollow". If that tag doesn't exist, then the link is dofollow.
-
Presuming that you're going to be linking to your website in the comment, I'd probably keep it limited to your own niche, but there's definitely room for a few comments from other industries.
If your comments are engaging, provide value to that blog's community and are not on blogs that are spammed to death, then you won't be doing any harm. The key is to comment something of worth and to integrate yourself into the community.
I always think of blog commenting as a way of establishing a community presence and to raise unaided brand awareness. Any subsequent link of page strength is an after-thought for me.
-
Thanks for the reply Tom, you were really helpful.
I had another question regarding the process of commenting on blogs/articles. Should I only comment on blogs/articles that are relative to my own niche or can I also comment and link from blogs/articles that are outside my niche?
-
Hi. Everything Tom said and I also wanted to add another extension to this - If you use Firefox this is for checking nofollow and dofollow links. When you add the extension, if you right click and select the nodofollow it hghlights nofollows in red and dofollows in blue. I use it all the time.
-
A dofollow link will pass the SEO strength, or "PageRank" of the page to the site that it links to. A nofollow link, in theory, will not do this. That's the main difference between the two.
By that logic, you may assume that a nofollow link will not help you rank for a keyword, but I don't think this is completely the case. Having a link to your site in any capacity may improve the "authoritativeness" of your site. SEOMoz uses Page Authority and Domain Authority to measure this and, while not an official Google metric, it stands to say that if you have 2 identical sites, one has 5 nofollow links from newspapers and the other has none, Google may well think that the site with the links has more authority or trust and may treat it more favourably. We all know how much Google loves to promote real brands.
As for seeing if a link is dofollow or nofollow, you can either inspect the element in the source code, or a convenient and hassle-free way to test is with the SEOMoz toolbar. That toolbar contains an option to highlight the links on the page - green links are dofollow and pink links are nofollow. If you check previous posts on any website, you should be able to see a pattern of whether they allow for dofollow or nofollow links - but in the end, this is at the discretion of the webmaster.
Hope this helps!
-
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal linking disaster
Can someone help me understand what my devs have done? The site has thousands of pages but if there's an internal homepage link on all of the pages (click on the logo) shouldn't that count for internal links? Could it be because they are nonfollow? http://goo.gl/0pK5kn I've attached my competitors opensiteexplorer rankings (I'm the 2nd column) .. so despite the face the site is new you can see where I'm getting my ass kicked. Thanks! psRsQtH.png
Technical SEO | | bradmoz0 -
Solutions for too many on-page links?
We have just begun using SEO Moz a few months ago and have been busy cleaning up some of our warnings and errors. One of the errors that has been an issue is ... too many on-page links. I am trying to correct this issue and I am wondering how seo moz counts these links. For instance... we have links to many of our product categories in a drop down from our main menu, those same links are listed in our footer. Does this get counted as two or only one link. If two, should we make one of the link no follow or how would you best suggest correcting this. Our website is www.unikeyhealth.com Since the menu and the footer appear on virtually every page on our site correcting this issue will quickly sort out this problem. Thanks for any advice.
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
Removal of all low PR links
I have a lot of old directory links which where done years ago, most I think will be effecting my site. Is there away to find them all ie through open explorer and then remove them in one go?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Back Link Question
Hi Folks, Our domain (www.alabu.com) has been around since 2000. We've accumulated a lot of back links over the years, many of which I don't recognize and didn't ask for. I've been reading on here recently about "cleaning up" back links. I do see a lot of ours that just aren't relevant and I don't know why they decided to link to us. We haven't gotten a warning from google or anything like that, but I wonder, how do I know if we could benefit from cleaning up our back links? Is there a benefit to it even if google hasn't warned us? Thanks! Hal
Technical SEO | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
Specific Link Page in Domain
Hi everyone: I have seen that many SEO Agencies have contacted my business (Also SEO but In- House) in order to interchange links. They have created a specific page on their site with the Label "Links" or similar, and on that page they add multiple links of the competence. I have heard that you can only do that if you make sure you add two things: No follow in links. Not inserting links of websites that have nothing to do with our sector. Either way, I have never found this amusing. I always recommend people not to do this but I have my doubts after all. ¿Could some one give me their opinion? Cheers !
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
If people link to you incorrectly, does it hurt you?
In Google WM tools I'm seeing so many 404 crawl errors but they're all from other sites linking to us incorrectly, which I can't do anything about. Will this hurt us somehow as far as SEO goes? The logical thing would be that it would hurt the site doiing the linking but it does come up in OUR WM tools, so it makes me wonder.
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Still Use Nofollow Home?
I was wondering how many of you are still nofollowing the Home button or anything else for that matter? I thought NoFollow was getting a little outdated, but I still see it lots of places. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | poolguy0 -
Removing inbound Spam Links
Hello, Last February one of my clients websites was delisted. It turns out that some time ago that had attempted to launch a social network along time lines of ning. The project had fallen apart of the was still up. At some point spammers found it and started using it as part of a link farm. Once it was discovered, the subdomain it was posted on was removed and the website returned to search within 2 weeks. Last week, the website disappeared again OSE shows that in the last 2 months the website has got 2000 (There are about 16,000 total spam links) additional spam links now pointing and the root domain. On top of that, Google Webmaster Tools is reporting about 15,000 404 errors. I have blocked Google from crawling the path where the path were the spam pages used to be. If there a way to block the 1000s of inbound spam links?
Technical SEO | | Simple_Machines0