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Do-Follow Vs. No-Follow Links: What’s The Difference & Why It Matters For SEO

There is no need to accentuate the importance of a strong backlink profile in search engine optimisation. Being an SEO professional or digital marketer, you know it’s worth and relevance. Backlinks of various kinds exist, and the one that follows a link juice in SEO matters most as per experts and search engines. In this blog, you will learn about the difference between do-follow and no-follow links and the best link-building tips

no-follow vs. Do-follow links

The relevance of backlinks in SEO

Backlinks are important for SEO because the search engine algorithm gives credit if any website has a large number of backlinks. As the backlink increases, the website’s popularity increases. Backlinks of many types exist, and user-relevant backlinks are hard to fetch. Your website’s relevance and authority mainly depend on the quality of your backlinks. A mere reciprocal link exchange will not bring any good. Instead, you need to own backlinks from top relevant websites. Increasing direct traffic and SERP position of the website can be deeply affected by the quality and quantity of backlinks.

Types of backlinks

Backlinks may be acquired from different platforms or spheres. In SEO, there are two types of backlinks: Do-follow backlinks and No-follow backlinks. 

Do-follow backlinks

Do-follow backlinks pass link juice to the website, hinting the search engines the need to pass authority and relevancy score. These links are default types of backlinks that usually SEO professionals care about as they pass link juice to the web pages. When you use a dofollow link, the search engines can follow and use it to assess a page’s authority, resulting in elevated SERP ranks and PageRank of the linked page. 

No-follow backlinks

No-follow backlink is actually a rel attribute that elucidates the relation between a link and the page. No-follow backlinks are used in SEO where you link to a web page but do not pass any link juice because there is no need to see the page as authoritative or valuable. Therefore, whenever you use a no-follow link, search engines never acknowledge it or pass any PageRank.

Nofollow backlink can have two types of rel attributes as introduced by Google:

Sponsored and ugc. Sponsored rel attribute denotes links with paid content such as ads or sponsored posts. Whereas the ugc rel attribute contains user-generated content. It is recommended to use nofollow links with these rel attributes to provide context to search engines to avoid penalty. No-follow links SEO impact is lesser compared to do-follow links, as they can only be used to get direct traffic and a positive hint to search engines. 

How to check if a link is do-follow or no-follow? It is quite simple. A rel attribute in the link implies a no-follow link, and others will be the default type, do-follow backlink. To see the rel attribute, click on your browser and go to View Page Source. Another way to check backlink type is to use an SEO auditing tool. 

Do-follow vs. no-follow links

The following are the major key points of Do-follow vs. no-follow links.

Do-follow backlink

  • It is  a following link
  • Standard and default type of backlinks
  • Search engine passes link juice to the web page
  • Improves search engine ranking of the website
  • Do-follow link contains

No-follow backlink

  • It is a no-follow link
  • Search engines are instructed not to follow or pass any PageRank
  • Search engines do not pass any link juice to the web page
  • It does not improve the search engine ranking of the website

Difference between do-follow and no-follow links

The following are the key differences between do-follow and no-follow links. 

Link value and SEO relevance

A do-follow link has link value passed down to the destination website, indicating relevance and authenticity, resulting in a boost in SERP ranks. On the other hand, a nofollow link never owns any link juice, and the No-follow links SEO impact is very low. 

Indexing

Indexing and crawling of do-follow links are much guaranteed by search engines than no-follow links. New content on these do-follow links gets crawled and indexed, whereas no-follow links generally do not get crawled and indexed but provide referral traffic to your website. 

Rel ugc attribute

Do-follow links remain the default and standard type of backlinks. On the other hand, nofollow links have been widely used on social media platforms as well as platforms such as online forums and blog posts.

When to use dofollow and no-follow links

Search engines like Google clearly provide guidelines on when to use do-follow and no-follow links. Do-follow vs. no-follow links regarding the time of use can be tricky to understand and apply. The following are several scenarios where you can use do-follow or no-follow backlinks. 

Do-follow

  • It is used on high-quality websites
  • Link to an external website that seems trustworthy and authoritative
  • For a genuine guest post
  • For social media profile linking

No-follow

  • When linking to sponsored links
  • If you link to user-generated content like blog post comments
  • Low-quality web pages or spammy links
  • Duplicated auto-generated pages
  • If you are unsure of the search engine’s penalty on a type of resource, you can apply nofollow

No-follow and do-follow backlinks play a key role in elevating your SEO efforts, especially do-follow links. As a digital marketer, you must be able to differentiate these two categories and know their use in SEO. No-follow links’ SEO impact is less, but it can also increase traffic and online visibility. We hope you can make informed decisions about backlink building by distinguishing no-follow and do-follow links. Besides, you need to be all ears to the recent trends and fads in the link building process. 
Search engines are designed to crawl and index your website. Indexing alone cannot bring the desired traffic and relevance to the target audience. Backlinks play a major role. We are sure you have an idea about Do-follow vs. No-follow links. With the help of a search engine optimization agency in Dubai, you can build a strong backlink profile with the right blend of Do-follow backlinks and No-follow backlinks.

Omkar Khatale Jangam

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