NoFollow vs. DoFollow - Should You Care?

By Vertical Measures • April 23rd, 2008

There’s a pretty big debate being waged on websites today between the “no follow” link contingent and the “do follow” advocates. Which side of the camp are you on? Maybe you haven’t decided because you really aren’t sure how each type of link works.

No follow links were first developed by Google as a way to control spam links on blogs and other sites. There was a valid complaint that many legitimate sites were being penalized if they had a large number of links to other sites with little or no value. By adding the no follow tag to any links (rel=“nofollow”), blog publishers and forum owners were provided a tool to prevent spammers from posting endless useless comments simply to get a free link back to a site that you might not want to be associated with.

A “no follow” link gives Google and other major search engines specific instructions. When a “no follow” code is part of a link, the theory goes that Google will NOT follow the link to the other page and it will NOT include the link when calculating Page Rank for your web page.

On the other hand, it’s nice to share some link juice with those who take the time to comment on your blog, sign your guest book or otherwise contribute something of value to your site. After all, wouldn’t you like them to return the favor to you some day?

As a link builder, we often get requests to find only “do follow” links for our clients.  But should they really insist on that?  Should you count the ratio of no follow to do follow links to your site (or from your site) to try and figure out the perfect balance?

Three Good Reasons Not to Care 

In our opinion, you really don’t need to worry too much about ratios or link counts. Here are three good reasons why:

1. The search engines expect to see a balance of “no follow” and “do follow” links to your site. What those exact ratios are can be debated, but it is clear that you should not be trying to get every link to your site as a “do follow”.

2. We haven’t seen any concrete proof that the three major search engines aren’t passing some link juice through “no follows”. In fact, we have seen some pretty good articles indicating that they feel they received some good link love from “no follow” links from authority sites.

3. Focus on getting links for traffic and you won’t have to worry about it at all.  This is often lost with link builders. So much emphasis is place on getting link juice for search engine rankings, that many forget that the best links of all bring real traffic to your site. If you get a link that sends you meaningful traffic, do you really care if it is “no follow” or “do follow”?

It all boils down to common sense – a balance of inbound links will generally do more to help your site when compared to concentrating on one method of link building. When in doubt, if it’s a quality site that wants to link to you, take the link, whether it is “do follow” or “no follow”.

[tags] no follow, do follow, link building [/tags]

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Comments(28) Link Building

Comments

By Julia from Fast Blog Finder on April 24th, 2008 at 2:16 am

Thank you for the informative article. I have a blog promoting link building software and I was often asked by my customers whether it is worth to spend time to “nofollow” links. In order not give a proofless answer, I did a case study to find our if “nofollow” links help.

I managed to get a dozen of “nofollow” links and looked if my website position had changed somehow in Google, MSN and Yahoo. I noticed NO changes. I came to the conclusion that the search engines behaved as so those links didn’t exist at all.

Then I got a dozen of “dofollow” links and immediately my website got the top position in those three search engines. So, “dofollow” links really count.

Despite of the results of my case study, I always suggest people not to ignore “nofollow” links. As you wrote there must be “a balance of inbound links”.

By SEO Bedrijven on April 24th, 2008 at 5:10 am

Basic incentive for getting links is good content followed and no followed. Traffic is the goal. So Id on’t really care about the follow/no follow business. I only care because Google made it an issue.

By Brandon on April 28th, 2008 at 11:28 am

That was good. I was trying to find the answer to this. Thank you.

By Eric on April 29th, 2008 at 3:25 pm

Much as I love the do follow links, I don’t pay any attention to which is which when I comment on a site. The link building will happen however it happens.

The sites that I manage all practice do follow. I either use a tight set of anti-spam rules and/or moderate all comments. If someone can manage to leave an additive comment they deserve the link.

I do commenting for traffic building and to be part of the conversation on interesting blogs because it makes the whole internet marketing game more fun. The link building is a nice side benefit.

By BJ on May 1st, 2008 at 12:32 am

do follow dont follow, still on the fence

By Laveranus on May 5th, 2008 at 12:38 pm

The no-follow tag I found out doesn’t always work. A friend of mine is an SEO and has tested backlinks and some no-followed links are actually passing in Google. Of course most aren’t but its interesting to notice.

By Pedro on May 5th, 2008 at 5:48 pm

I have yet to see any added benefit of having nofollow on outbound links from my site. Neither the toolbar PR or the site’s rankings in search experienced any notable increase during my experimentations with this attribute.

By Sonal on May 17th, 2008 at 4:49 am

It is solve my general query about ” nofollow - dofollow”. But it is complete when you show also an example of this. I think this will be easier for a newbie.

By PC Sport Live on June 4th, 2008 at 8:15 pm

I think the majority of people are just trying to gain exposure for their site rather than boost page rank. However soem people like to show off their page rank because it makes them feel better.

By Xocai on June 12th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

My understanding was that google does not attribute much value to them, but Yahoo and MSN do.

By Nate Nead on June 26th, 2008 at 8:07 am

I’m just really learning about nofollow vs. dofollow. Thanks for this article. It was informative. After reading it sounds like you shouldn’t worry about nofollow vs. dofollow and just continue commenting and exchanging links. Great stuff.

By wilson on August 12th, 2008 at 12:58 pm

Google will always show the lesser backlinks, if it compare with the Yahoo and MSN…

By the way, thanks for the wonderful post and it did help me to understand the different between dofollow and nofollow links.

By Filipino blogger on September 22nd, 2008 at 8:37 pm

thanks for sharing you knowledge.

By Foxster on September 28th, 2008 at 8:17 am

I’m currently waffling between using a nofollow plugin or not. It seems right to reward commenters, but I’m just worried about spending time screening spam. Although Akismet seems to do a pretty darn good job of catching most stuff.

By Marijuana Art on November 5th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

spamming is one thing but as my man said above it does seem right to reward commenters.

By John on January 2nd, 2009 at 5:18 pm

A good tool to find nofollow websites is http://www.followtopia.com . They have an index as large as yahoo’s, and let you know if the results have the no follow tag.

Optimize away.

By Website Design Valencia on February 10th, 2009 at 9:22 am

Really interesting subject and balanced article. I’ve got the default “nofollow” on my blog but am increasingly tempted to change to dofollow. But then I believe you need hardcore culling policies - I wouldn’t want dofollow to non-webdev-related sites because they’re just not related. Also you end up with stupid names like the one I used above, (I hope you like it). Normally I don’t do that even on dofollow pages because it does look a little silly, but today I thought I’d slip it in because it demonstrates the point :-).

By Hockey Jerseys on February 19th, 2009 at 10:34 pm

How about links without any tag (nofollow nor dofollow)?

This article does give a good point, though.

By AD Web Design on March 16th, 2009 at 5:04 pm

Thanks for the article, it's food for thought - like you say a balanced approach is probably the best bet, and will mean that you won't be triggering any filters that exist to check for too high a ratio of dofollows.

By Matt Inertia on March 18th, 2009 at 2:34 pm

Exactly, links that bring traffic should be the number one priority but then there are lots of SEOs out there who are struggling with sites which dont have good content. For them, finding juicy links is one of the few things they can do (as well as content creation).

By Chris @ Laptop Deals on April 11th, 2009 at 1:56 am

This article is a little old but after reading it I'm falling in love with whoever wrote it. It seems to me that seo is afraid of the nofollow tags and try and stay away from it. As you said, search engines expect to see a ratio between 'nofollow' and 'dofollow' links and if the majority of your website is linked by 'dofollows', then well, isn't that suspicious activities. I'd said it once and I'll say it again, search engines can be manipulated, but google isn't stupid.

Thanks for the article, I loved it.

By Justin on April 17th, 2009 at 4:03 pm

I am trying to increase my backlink manually through guestbooks. Notice quite a number of the sites are nofollow type. I will monitor and report back if I have concrete data to show if nofollow is really not useful. I am not targeting thousands of BL, so, should be able to manage. Wish me all the luck.

By Fred G on April 22nd, 2009 at 10:59 am

Sorry for my ignorance, but how can you tell if a blog has a no follow tag or a do follow tag?

By The Flex Person on April 30th, 2009 at 12:42 pm

Any link is still a link, so I believe in terms of traffic it is hugely advisable to make your presence in the web by any means available. If these count, then good, but if they don't, it's not that big a deal and won't prevent me from posting a comment whenever I feel like doing so.

By Tap Dance Instructors on May 15th, 2009 at 2:39 am

I think no follow and do follow are both good. It always depend on blog owners. What do you think?

By David Allen @ Wolverhampton Computer help on June 10th, 2009 at 4:36 am

I’m not a fan of spammers. I feel if your going to link to your site from someones blog at least have the respect to read there article and add a related comment.
I’ve only known about dofollow blogs for a couple of weeks and i have enjoyed reading peoples views on a range of subjects and it benefiting my site at the same time.

I’m strongly thinking about setting my own blog up.

By child health club on June 24th, 2009 at 3:46 am

hi every one so many of them try to send No follows that is no use …please try to avoid…

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