Websites in various fields and categories are not devoid of links, whether they are internal links, pointing to other pages within the same site, or external links, pointing to pages on other sites.
Links are generally classified into two main types:
- Dofollow
- Nofollow
These types of links do not directly affect the user experience within the site, but rather their basic and fundamental impact is on the search engines and the SEO evaluation of the site, so if you are interested in your site being at the top of the search results on the Google engine and others, you must learn about these two types of links and how to invest in them. well on your site.
In this article, we will highlight the fundamental differences between Dofollow links and Nofollow links , and how these links can affect your site’s ranking in search results based on the way they are exploited within the site’s pages.
Outbound links and inbound links
Before we begin our journey explaining Dofollow or nofollow links, we must point out that our discussion will focus on the difference between these links, whether they are outgoing links from your site (Outbound links) to other sites, or incoming links from external sites to your own site (Inbound links).
Therefore, when we talk, for example, about the benefits of Dofollow-type links, we mean their benefit, whether they are incoming links from external sites to your site, or outgoing from your site to other sites.
The difference between Dofollow links and Nofollow links
One of the main steps in building websites is the inclusion of internal and external links within the site content, which lead to other pages within the same site or to other external sites.
The primary goal of these links is to support the user’s browsing experience and facilitate the process of searching for information and smooth navigation between different types of content.
Another goal of attaching links within the site is search engine optimization ( SEO improvement ) for the site, as search engines consider sites that include internal or external links to be good sites and provide useful and rich content, because they allow the user to view other sources related to the topic he is searching for.
In fact, links, whether Dofollow or Nofollow , are a double-edged sword, as they may add great value to the site and may pose a danger and a negative vulnerability to it. This depends on the type of link you add within the content, in addition to the reputation of the site you refer to via external links.
First: Dofollow links
To clarify the concept and usefulness of Dofollow-type links, we will summarize their concept in the following three points:
Regarding the site code
Any link added within the site will be of Dofollow type by default unless it is later changed to Nofollow. When adding any link within the content, the HTML tag is used as follows:
As we can see in the previous code, the <a> tag is used to add links to websites, and as you can notice, this tag contains an href description; It is followed by the link you want to go to when you click on it.
Therefore, if you want to include a Dofollow link on your site, all you have to do is add the previous tag and change the link to the link you want to refer to.
For search engines
Search engines differentiate between links according to their type, Dofollow or Nofollow, and in general, search engines prefer Dofollow links more than the other type when it comes to ranking sites that include these two types of links.
The more Dofollow links that point to your site, the more search engines trust the site, and thus give it priority to appear in search results instead of other sites competing with you that have a smaller number of Dofollow links, provided that the content of your site is compatible with search engine policies (compatible With SEO) and provides a distinctive user experience.
Although search engines show great interest in Dofollow links that point to your site, these links may pose a great danger and threat to your site if they are included illegally. One of the most important conditions for external links to the site is that these links be on closely related sites. With the content of your site.
For example, if your site provides cooking recipes content and a Dofollow link comes to it from another site that focuses on technical explanations, then in this case that link will not be useful for your site’s SEO, and search engines may evaluate that link as a kind of cheating, and it may end up with negative results on your site. Its SEO rating declined.
Therefore, if you want to gain the trust of search engines, you must strive to obtain a good number of Dofollow links to your site, but make sure that they are from sites related to the content of your site.
For your site visitors
In fact, site visitors do not care whether the links on your site are Dofollow or Nofollow, and this disparity will not affect their experience within the site, provided that they benefit from the content available in those links that you include for them within the content.
Therefore, always try to add useful links for visitors to your site, as this is the essence of visitors’ interest. Take, for example, the following link through which you can view an explanation of SEO for beginners. It is a link that is closely related to the content of the article and can provide you with additional benefit.
Second: Nofollow links
We learned about the concept of the first type of links, now we will discuss the concept of other Nofollow links, which we can summarize in the following points:
Regarding the site code
As we mentioned in the first type, Dofollow, <a> is used to add the link within the site, and the same tag is used to add Nofollow links, but notice the difference in the following code, which creates a Nofollow link:
We note that the description rel=”nofollow” was added in the previous code so that the link is defined as Nofollow.
So, from a technical standpoint, there is no difference in creating Dofollow-type links and Nofollow-type links, except in adding the definition rel=”nofollow,” which converts the link from the first type to the second type.
For search engines
Search engines give less attention to Nofollow links, and sometimes it is arbitrary, meaning that search engines give a lower rating to sites that add links without identifying them as Nofollow, such as sponsored links, which are inserted within the site content, and which display a link to paid or advertising content. .
Search engines view Nofollow links as less important links that do not provide much benefit to visitors, and therefore they do not care about them often, and do not consider them an essential factor in ranking sites in search results, unlike Dofollow links, which search engines place among the influential SEO factors. In the ranking of sites, as we mentioned.
In general, various search engines, such as Google, advise site owners to mark links of little importance as Nofollow links. This helps “web crawlers” save time wasted in (crawling) links that are not useful and do not represent great importance. This, in turn, is reflected in the confidence of search engines in your site.
Therefore, be sure to add the Nofollow designation to all external links that point to other sites that do not represent great importance within the content of your site. If you use WordPress, it automatically characterizes all external links that users add in the comments below the content as Nofollow links without your intervention.
Regarding website visitors
As we mentioned, visitors are not interested in knowing the type of link as much as they are interested in knowing the benefit they will get from the content of the links within the site .
You can easily know the type of any link, whether it is Dofollow or Nofollow, by entering the page where the link is located, and opening the source code of the page by clicking with the right button of the mouse and choosing (View Page Source) or (Show Source Code), and the code for the link will appear to you. Through it, you can determine whether the link is of the Nofollow type, as it contains the description rel=Nofollow, but if this description does not exist, then the link is of the dofollow type.
You can also use the following Google Chrome browser extension: Strike Out Nofollow Links or similar ones, which, once installed on your browser, tell you the types of all the links that are present on any web page you visit without the need to open the source code and search inside it manually.
Examples of uses of Dofollow and Nofollow links
After we learned about the basic differences between the two types of links, we will highlight some examples and cases in which it is better to invest in one or both types, whether in terms of providing a good user experience or in terms of improving the site’s search engines.
Examples of when to use Dofollow links
- Internal links on your site , which point to other related pages or articles within the site. These internal links provide a good user experience for visitors and help them deepen their understanding of the topic they are reading about.
- External links that point to well-known sites that have great trust, such as Wikipedia for example, where you can add links to these sites with Dofollow tags. This strategy will not negatively affect your site provided that it points to a link with content closely related to your site, as we mentioned.
Examples of when Nofollow links are used
- Links that site visitors add within comments at the bottom of articles and pages. WordPress automatically designates this type of link as Nofollow.
- Links that lead to paid advertising content, such as adding an advertising link to a product or service. In this case, it is better to set this link as Nofollow and not Dofollow. Google may recommend that you add a tag rel=”sponsored.”
- Links posted on social media sites like Facebook and YouTube, which are automatically flagged by WordPress are also Nofollow.
- Links that are added in widgets, and WordPress also automatically sets them as Nofollow.
- Most news sites mark all links they place within their content as Nofollow.
- Links to social media accounts within your site; It is best to mark it as Nofollow.
The benefits and harms of external links of various types
It is worth saying that despite the advantages and limitations of both Dofollow and Nofollow types of links, adopting the appropriate type on your site will be a source of strength, and on the other hand, random use will have a negative impact. It all depends on the place and method in which the link is placed.
We mentioned earlier that search engines do not give much importance to Nofollow links, but nevertheless these links may be useful to your site if a site adds a Nofollow link to your site and visitors to that site access the link and go to your site through it. In this case, you will gain more traffic. Visits and perhaps more followers and people interested in your site’s content.
External links are useful for your site in the following cases:
- When reliable or famous sites add external links that lead to the site (inbound links).
- External links are useful even if they are Nofollow provided that you invest in a place that is related to the content of your site, in this case it will help to gain more visitors to your site. It is worth noting here that visitors coming from other sites to your site are called “referral visitors,” as in Google Analytics reports .
- When you publish links to your site on social media platforms, you benefit from those links by gaining visits from users of social media platforms to your site, in addition to increasing search engines’ confidence in your site due to regular publishing and visitors’ interaction with your content published on those platforms.
- When you participate in forums that display content related to your site content, and you interact and publish useful content for forum visitors while adding a link to your site. This link will most often be of the Nofollow type, but it will help spread the site’s name and fame, and site owners may add links to your site on their sites without your intervention.
External links are harmful to your site in the following cases:
- If you use ready-made programs to publish large amounts of links to your site in various places across the Internet in a random manner, in this case search engines may consider your site to be a suspicious site (spam) that includes annoying content, and you may lose the rankings of many of the pages of your site through which you were ranking. research results.
- If you agree with some website owners to exchange links between your site and their sites, such that large amounts of their site links are included within the content of your site and vice versa in a random manner that does not benefit the visitor, in this case search engines may question the credibility of your site, which negatively affects the site’s ranking.
- When you create multiple accounts in a large number of forums and post your site links in topics that are not related to your site content, this wrong strategy will negatively affect your site as well.
- If you post links to your site on sites or forums with illegal content that violates search engine policies, such as sites that provide unethical or fraudulent content.
How do you add a Nofollow link within your website content?
As we mentioned earlier, there is no specific way to add a Dofollow link, because once the link is added to the content, it is listed as Dofollow by default.
If you want to change the link type to Nofollow, there are many ways to accomplish this, one of which is the manual method, and all you have to do is open the HTML editing page, as indicated by the red arrows in the following image.
Then you will see the editing page that contains the code for the page you are working on. On the editing page, you can add the following description: rel=nofollow inside the <a> tag of the link, as shown in the following image.
You can also use one of the add-ons specialized in this task, such as the Rel Nofollow add -on, which, once installed and activated on your site, will set all outgoing links from your site to external sites as Nofollow links automatically and without your intervention. You can change any link that you want to exclude from the automatic assignment process after that using the manual method that we explained in the previous paragraphs.
Conclusion
In short, the type of link itself, whether it is Dofollow or nofollow, does not have a significant impact on your site as much as the source of the link and the content it refers to. Let us take it as a general rule: It is preferable to always focus your attention on the quality of the content and publish links to your site on sites or forums related to the content of your site to gain the trust of visitors and thus gain the trust of search engines as well.
One last tip, always try to set outbound links to external sites as Nofollow; Because this helps search engines, when they crawl your site’s content, not to give priority to those links and focus more on archiving your site’s content.
