A Dofollow link is one that helps SEO, passing authority from the original site to the other website. A dofollow link is one of the links Google (and other search engines) will potentially follow and scan, in terms of driving traffic to the site. A dofollow link is a hyperlink linking to another page or website, and is used by search engines to help ranking websites.
Ideally, any dofollow link points search engines to content that is up-to-date, relevant, and accurate, which, in turn, provides link juice to both the outside site and your own website. It is best if your site receives a dofollow link from a higher PR website, since they pass on more link juice than lower PR websites. When it comes to outbound links from high PR sites leading back to your pages, a dofollow is perfect.
There might be cases when it is good to reciprocate with a dofollow link, particularly if you are looking to increase site traffic and the external site has similar rankings as your page. Since links are considered to be dofollows by default, and they affect SEO, for instance, you might want to link to competitors without impacting their rankings. In other words, if you receive a nofollow backlink, the linked page does not transfer the authority to your page.
Dofollow backlinks and nofollow backlinks are the two ways to recognize the link and let Google know how to connect the site that is linked to your site. Nofollow may be important in cases when you need to keep Google and other search engines from following links that might be harmful or unrepresentative of what your site is all about. Nofollowing internal links may harm the search visibility of your website, particularly if they are links to important pages, and you want those pages to rank in SERPs.
If your site is linked from another site, and it does not decide to add the nofollow tag, then search engines will come to your pages naturally, and boost your overall PageRank. Ideally, you will want to have a mixture of nofollow and dofollow links on your pages, so that search engines will not see your content just as a means of earning you page rank points. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to a best nofollow/dofollow ratio, simply ensure that you are earning diverse links from different domains, all authoritative and relevant to your webpage.
If you want to keep paid links from having any sort of effect on users and their search results, be sure to change any paid links into nofollows. You should use nofollow links when there are a lot of external links coming from one page or part of your site that leads to suspect or irrelevant websites.
Changing those links from nofollow to dofollow is simple, but it requires that the owner of the destination website contact the administrator of the linked website and request a change. By default, links are followed by search crawlers and pass the link juice back to the pages to which they are linked, but this default behavior does not apply when a nofollow attribute value is specified. Sometimes, websites are showing they do not necessarily endorse a linked page, and that is when the nofollow value of the rel attribute is triggered.
Now, research suggests that Google may recognize nofollow links, and assign some value to websites to which they are linked. In other words, while humans may view external links in websites as hyperlinked text, they are in no position to know if this link is DoFollow or NoFollow.
The links still work in the same manner, but Google views them differently depending on which tags are used, and as you might have guessed, Dofollow links carry more value than Nofollow links. Many quality sites use Dofollow links when paid for links from other websites, but they default to Nofollow links for links that are not sponsored, so that they are not giving their link juice away for free.
You want to have some portion of your sites link profile consisting of Nofollow links, so that you get links from high-quality sites, and signal to search crawlers that your site is legit, rather than sprinkling in Dofollow links. While you will not receive the full SEO benefits of Dofollow links, Nofollow links can drive traffic to your website, while also diversifying your backlink portfolio. Many websites offer paid dofollow links, however, I would recommend that you stay clear of these websites, because rather than improving the ranking of your site, this may harm your reputation in Googles eyes, and may cause Googles robots to label you a spammer.
According to Googles webmaster guidelines, any links that you pay should be nofollowed (or use the new rel=sponsored attribute). If you paid for a guest post, and have links to multiple pages on your site via this post, then according to Googles guidelines, links within that post should have the link rel=sponsored attribute, and also the nofollow tag applied. Google recommends using the rel=nofollow tag the following ways, Use a sponsored attribute when no other values apply, and you would prefer that Google not link to, or spider pages linked to, your website.
Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to a link can prevent Google from following the link while scanning a site, and Google will not treat the link as voting for the page to which it links. Sometimes websites do not want to give a credit to a source of links, and a value of nofollow tells search engines that a linked webpage is not necessarily what you intended for credit. Nofollow links – which are hyperlinks that carry the rel=nofollow tag – might not transfer link equity from one site to another, but they may indirectly affect the SEO performance of your site.
