09 FebImprove Your Link Building with DoFollow

DoFollow is simply an internet slang term given to web pages or sites that are not utilizing NoFollow. NoFollow is a hyperlink inclusion that tells search engines not to pass on any credibility or influence to an outbound link.

Originally created to help the blogging community reduce the number of inserted links into a “comment” area of a blog page, the attribute is typically standard in blog comments. It helps overwhelmed webmasters disallow spammers from gaining any kind of advantage by inserting an unwanted link on a popular page.

As a result of the implementation of NoFollow: link building has taken a massive hit, as many sites including Wikis, social bookmarking sites, corporate and private blogs, commenting plugins and many other venues and applets across the internet began implementing NoFollow. This made effective link building difficult for both honest people and spammers alike.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with getting NoFollow links. In fact, you’ll want to get an equal amount of them as well. While they don’t pass on link juice, they do help associate your site with anchor text (the keyword phrase that makes up the URL pointing to your site).

How Search Engines Use NoFollow 

Search engines each interpret NoFollow in their own way. Here’s a list of the major search engines, and their actions when a NoFollow link is seen:

• Google follows NoFollow links but simply does not pass on credit to an outbound link that is tagged with the attribute.
• Yahoo follows NoFollow links and excludes the link from all ranking calculations.
• MSN may or may not follow a NoFollow link, but it does exclude it from ranking calculations.
• Ask.com does not adhere to NoFollow.

Finding DoFollow Sites 

With all of the above being said – it is rather difficult to find sites that are “DoFollow“…however, they are out there! Listed below for your convenience are running lists of multiple categories of sites that are DoFollow, and great candidates for your next backlink!

In getting links, regardless of if they’re DoFollow or not, please note that Google and other search engines are rather smart these days. If you have multiple links pointing to a page from one DoFollow source, or if that source is also linking to other places that are giving you backlinks (such as your Blogspot or WordPress account), search engines will notice and may devalue your links to the point where they become worthless. Build links naturally and over time. Provide value and they’ll be quality links. Otherwise, you’ll hurt your website’s link building efforts in the long-run.

By the way — when it comes to link building, only the first link pointing to a site counts. Posting more than one hyperlink on the same page to the same source won’t help in any way.

How to Spot DoFollow Links 

…and NoFollow ones, too

If you use Firefox, a quick way to find DoFollow links is to spot the NoFollow ones! A free plugin called SearchStatus does just that: it will highlight all “NoFollow” links on a page.

Everything not highlighted is DoFollow. It’s a quick and easy way to do a background check on your backlinking resources to see if they’ve retained DoFollow status!

  Are you involved in link building either as a SEO professional or for your website, then please share your experiences of DoFollow with us.