If you’ve been doing any kind of reading about link building,
then you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow”
links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying
to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search
engine rankings. But, to the person who is new to all of this, it may be
kind of confusing. I am going to help break it down for you.
No-Follow
Nofollow is a value that can
be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some
search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's
ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the
effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving
the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from
occurring.
Example
<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">discount drugs</a>
What nofollow is not for
The nofollow attribute value
is not meant for blocking access to content, or for preventing content
to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search
engine spiders from accessing content on a website or for preventing
them from including the content of a page in their index are the Robots
Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on-page Meta
Elements that are designed to specify on an individual page level what a
search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the
crawled page
What are “Do Follow” blogs?
“Do follow” is the opposite
of “No-Follow”. Wordpress blogs, by default, use the HTML nofollow
attribute on links that point away from the blog. This no follow
attribute comes into play with the posting of blog comments. The
no-follow tag tells the search engines NOT to follow the link to any
other web sites.
The logic behind using no
follow is, it’s good for the blog since there will be fewer outgoing
links and therefore less “link bleed”, leading to better Google page
rank. Sounds good!
Using no follow also makes
sense because there are blog spammers out there who will, and have,
posted blog spam comments solely for the benefit of getting more
incoming links to their site, which helps page rank. That makes sense!
Do Follow blogs are going against the norm and turning the No-Follow tag off, enabling do-follow of out going comment links.
Why Go Do-Follow?
If you’re like me, you want
people to comment on your blog posts. You want more of an interactive
community. That’s what Web 2.0 is about – community, relationships, and
user created content.
But, how do you encourage
people to comment on your blog posts? You give them something in return.
You give them an outgoing link to their website, when they make a
quality comment on your blog. You also allow the search engine to follow
that link to their website by using the do follow attribute.
You also need to let people
know that you are a Do Follow Blog. Some visitors will have no idea what
that means, but those who do know what it means will appreciate it and
will often leave a comment.
