Nofollow vs Dofollow Links • VNTWeb

The nofollow and dofollow tags are added to HTML hyperlinks to indicate to search engines whether value should be given to the link, when used in SEO ranking valuation.

Contrary to expectation the use of nofollow and dofollow links don’t govern whether a search engine robot will follow the link.

For a given web page search engines will assign a value to the page, based on a range of criteria. This value is then spread across all of the links on the page. Fewer links will mean each has a higher value. And the receiving websites will reap more benefit.

Here’s an example link, in its basic form, to the website example.com.

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>www.example.com</a>

And with the nofollow added.

<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>www.example.com</a>

In the above the nofollow has been added with the addition of the text rel=”nofollow” within the opening part of the link.

The dofollow may be added in a similar manner.

If the link is left without either of the two values then it is taken to be a dofollow link.

Don’t forget that the nofollow links may still be followed by a search engine robot. The value of the link won’t be passed in terms of SEO value.

If you are adding the parameter as html code you should have no issues. CMS editors may not offer nofollow as an option, or the added parameter may be cleaned from the link tag.

If you are using WordPress’s block editor an option is given to open a link in a new window but other parameters such as nofollow/dofollow aren’t available.

Therefore to add this parameter to a link flip the block into code view and edit the link. Take care not to break the formatting as the editor will ask about correcting the error. I am always cautious about whether the right choices will be made.

I have found that when using the WordPress blocks editor, setting the link to open in a new tab the rel parameter is changed to:

rel=”noreferrer noopener”

My previously added rel”nofollow” has been removed.

The noreferrer tag is used to hide the information from the landing website from where the visitor came from.

Nofollow

Links on a web page which are marked as nofollow donate no points towards that website.

The points consideration on the web page will be distributed across the other links on the page.

Using the nofollow setting you can limit the link juice to a few targeted links on a page. Why give more to an existing highly valued site when taking it away from your outgoing juice links will give them higher value.

Only the human visitors to the website will be following the link.

As of September 2019 nofollow links are used by Google as an indication not a hard rule.