Dofollow VS Nofollow Backlinks

In the previous article, we learned about importance of backlink building in SEO. Now we will proceed to the two different types of backlinks which are dofollow and nofollow backlinks.
As I have mentioned in my previous article that search engines index a site according to its popularity so this article will help us understanding how search engine follows the backlinks to index a domain or website.

First of all we understand what is meant by dofollow and nofollow backlinks and then we will move further. Before proceeding further, you should know how to adopt working backlink strategies.

Dofollow Links:

A clickable hyperlink is always a dofollow link unless it contains a rel="nofollow" in its HTML markup. As most of you know that all links are made clickable by HTML. Below is the example of a dofollow link.

<a href="http://www.helpitx.com" target="_blank">IT Help Zone</a>

You see that there is no rel="nofollow" attribute in it. The href attribute is used to make the link clickable while the target="_blank" attribute direct browsers to open the link in a new page. This link is always dofollow. Search engines follow all dofollow links in indexing a site.

Nofollow Links:

A clickable link with attribute rel="nofollow" is a nofollow link which is not followed and indexed by search engines. Below is the example of nofollow link.

< a href="http://www.google.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google</a>

Search engines don't follow this type of links for indexing. However not all search engines avoid following nofollow links. There is a variation among different search engines how they index and follow a nofollow attribute.

Site and blog owners often put a no=follow attribute in their HTML structure to make all links nofollow to avoid spam and saving their rankings.
Now I will explain the importance of both type of links and how to make full of them for SEO.

Importance Of Dofollow Backlinks:

Dofollow backlinks are of high importance because Google and other search engines follow these backlinks to index a site according to backlinks quantity and quality. They are responsible for improving PR of the site and its higher indexing in search engines.

Presence of your site's link on dofollow pages results in a better indexing of your pages because they tell search engines crawlers to follow the link so they insert it into index. Dofollow backlinks from high PR sites are more valuable because search engines respect those links because of their presence on authority sites. But as I warned in my previous article, paying to get dofollow links from directories and other sources isn't a good option because Google may penalize your website for doing so always look for genuine dofollow backlinks in order to maximize your SEO.

Importance Of Nofollow Backlinks:

Nofollow backlinks aren't followed by search engines so someone may ask then why to waste time posting links on pages with rel="nofollow" attribute?

The answer is here, though Google doesn't follow the links with nofollow attribute but there is variation among other search engines to follow a nofollow link or not so don't get worried from it. On the other hand, nofollow links cannot harm your rankings because Google has nothing to do with them so it just ignore them and do nothing. However suspicious dofollow links can cause trouble so they are better from this point of view.

Also if nofollow links send traffic to your site, then why you worry? Traffic is most important factor in SEO for which we try very hard so nofollow links which give you traffic are better than those dofollow links which may harm your rankings so don't bother with nofollow links and continue to build backlinks as normal but in a genuine way.

Why Site Owners Make External Links Nofollow:

In the end, you must be wondering why site owners put a rel="nofollow" attribute for all external links in their site. It is because if there is a dofollow link on a website with the niche other than that of the site, Google and other search engines will follow and find it irrelevant which may effects the site rankings negatively.

Spammers keep trying to post their links on other webpages insanely without taking care of the niche of site so nofollow attribute is used by site owners to prevent decrease in their rankings. However a better moderation in comments might reduce this risk but to save time the only solution is to make all external links nofollow.

So introduction to dofollow and nofollow backlinks ends here. I hope it will help you better in improving your blog's search engine rankings. I will be explaining more aspects of search engine optimization in future Inshallah so be updated with my future posts.