With the help of links, the search engine bots recognize the relationships between the websites. Bots travel from one website to another via a dofollow link. HTML also has nofollow links, which let search engines know that they shouldn’t follow a link.
In fact, according to ablogtophone, a dofollow link is not a special thing. Dofollow is the default status for a link. Or to put it another way: Any link without the “nofollow” attribute is a dofollow link. If a third-party website refers to your own site with a standard link (dofollow link), this can have an impact on the search engine rankings.
Here is an example of the syntax of a normal dofollow link:
href = ”https://www.example.com/lexikon/”> SEO kitchen
Why is that interesting? The more high-quality links refer to your own website, the more traffic is generated. And not only from visitors who click on the links, but also from the search engines. Of the top 100 websites in the Google ranking, well over 90 percent have a lot of backlinks. Some of these websites have more than 2000 backlinks.
The value of backlinks
All search engines and especially Google consider a high number of backlinks as a quality feature for a website. Google has been using a weighting system called Page Rank since 2005 to determine how valuable a website is. This system takes into account the value of links pointing to a page or website. High quality links can result in this website moving up in the search results ranking.
How do dofollow links affect site ranking?
The search engine bots scour the web using the dofollow links and register who is linking to whom. These relationships provide a kind of yardstick that SEO professionals also refer to as “link juice”. If a reputable website is linked to your own site, this will improve the page ranking on a search engine. Further information on the topic of page rank can be found here.
How does a link become a dofollow link?
In addition to the dofollow link, there is also a nofollow link in HTML. Technically, the only difference between a dofollow and a nofollow tag is that a nofollow link has a nofollow tag. Here’s an example:
href = ”https://www.example.com/lexikon/blog”> rel = ”nofollow” SEO kitchen / blog
This tag tells search engines to ignore the link. Because nofollow links are not recorded in the page rank, they do not affect the ranking in search engines.
To the average webpage user, dofollow and nofollow links look exactly the same. The nofollow link only contains the code rel = ”nofollow”, which is referred to as an attribute.
According to Google, nofollow links do not pass on a page rank to the linked website. This means that they do not directly influence the position of your website in the search results.
Recognize a dofollow link
Dofollow and nofollow links are invisible to normal users. However, there are a few ways to view the different links. It’s pretty easy with the Chrome browser. To do this, right-click on an element of the page and select the “Investigate” option in the context menu that opens.
The HTML code appears in a special window in which it is easy to see whether a link is marked with nofollow. Otherwise it is a dofollow link. The key combination Ctrl + F can be used to search specifically for nofollow links on the page. There are also numerous plug-ins for the well-known browsers that can automatically search the source text of a page for nofollow tags.
When should dofollow links be used?
Dofollow links are standard and should be used with a few exceptions. When linking your own pages with those of other providers, the nofollow attribute can also be used. This could happen for the following content:
- Blog comments
- Forums
- Affiliate Link
- Social media
- Sponsored content or ads
- Press releases
- Untrustworthy websites
- Widgets
Google evaluates the links on each website to see if the links appear natural. This means that a normal link profile with links from relevant websites can contain follow and nofollow links. Most successful websites have a large number of dofollow links. A nofollow tag should be used for all unnatural links.
Website owners should spend some time checking that their website’s backlink profile is optimized and free of errors. After going through the above analysis, opportunities arise. Dofollow links can help with the creation of the PageRank. However, nofollow links bring valuable traffic and engagement.
Two new link attributes
The web is constantly evolving. For this reason, Google introduced two new link attributes in 2019 as part of search engine optimization (https://www.example.com/lexikon/suchmaschinenoptimierung-seo/):
rel = ”sponsered”
This attribute is used to mark links that are being promoted or created as part of sponsorship or paid placements. Previously, these link types had the nofollow attribute, and it is still an acceptable way to flag them.
Rel = “ugc”
The behavior of users (users) on the web now plays a very important role. UGC stands for User Generated Content. This attribute can be used to mark user generated links, namely comments, forum posts and more.
These new attributes help analyze links in more detail and interpret them better by Google. Links with this attribute are probably most valuable when they lead to content that comes from real users who are preferably heavily involved in a particular discussion. This can help create a natural linkage profile.
