What are do follow links?
“do follow” are links to your site from another which Google recognises and adds to your sites overall ranking power. Many refer to this as “Link Juice”. In theory the more of these links you have, and the higher the Page Rank of the referring site the better.
However one of Google’s goals is to promote good content which is developed in a natural way and from sites who do not try to manipulate the system as many do with automatic link building software. So for this reason there is a point at which you can have too many links produced too quickly.
The official number of links per day that is acceptable is highly debated and in reality unknown to the general public…………I digress so let’s get back to topic and I will continue this theme after I have explained “no follow”.
“no follow” are links from websites where the owner/webmaster has added the “no follow” command to all outbound links. This tells Google to disregard the links from their when calculating another linking sites search engine ranking. Basically they take away the “link juice”
Why would they make their site do follow?
You ask. Well it’s all personal preference. Sites which are “do follow” tend to attract slightly more people because website owners can gain link juice from these sites.
Either through forum signatures, profile links, comments and many other ways they can place a link back to their own site.
By the way, with the premium commentluv plugin, as a website owner, you can have more control over what to allow as do follow and no follow links. To know more read this post:
However the flip side is that in many webmaster’s views these visitors are potentially worth less than a normal visitor because they may have an ulterior motive and may have little to no interest in the site itself. More so if the site has a high page rank.
Why would you want a link that has no “link Juice”?
This is also a hot debate in general with no real closure. Taking into account Google’s need for fresh relevant content and that they like to see backlinks from referring sites build in a natural and organic way.
It would seem very unnatural to have all the inbound links to be either “do follow” or “no follow” but rather a mixture would be a much more organic likelihood.
How To Tell If a Website Is “do follow” or “no follow”
So now that we have explained the “why” let’s move on to the “How”.
There are many ways to check if a link is “nofollow” but to keep it simple let’s stick to the one i use and one alternative:
1. Check the page source
Goto the page you want to check:
- “view the page source” by right clicking with your mouse
- find a HTML link to the site that is being linked to from the site
- look for something like a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://mysite.com/” or to see link in full html… <a href=”forumdisplay.php?do=markread” rel=”nofollow”>Mark Forums Read</a>
The default setting for links is “do follow” so if you do not see the “nofollow” command the link is “do follow”. The example above would be NoFollow and there won’t be any link juice passing backlinks from this site.
Search tip: When viewing the page’s source code, go to the Edit menu at the top and click on find, a search box will appear and you can look for keywords in the link – it makes it a lot easier to sift through what could be a huge amount of HTML.
2. Use an Addon:
You can download an Addon for Google Chrome – This is only one example of a free tool you can use (no affiliation). I have not used this myself as i find the first method to be quick and easy but it’s always nice to have options if anyone has tried some other tools which work please feel free to get involved and report back.
To close I would personally recommend that you build your links by using a mixture of both “do follow” and “no follow” to help your links hold to a more natural overall appearance. I would also suggest adding some .EDU & .GOV links into the mix where possible.
High PR is also a benefit when link building. A free tool you can use to check a sites PR is PRChecker. I hope you all find this helpful and welcome your thoughts and ideas.
Read more: Do Follow or No Follow? How to Tell The Difference and Why Should You Care?
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