Ideally, any dofollow link points search engines towards current, relevant, and accurate content, which, in turn, provides link juice to both the outside site and your own website. The more dofollow links you are able to get, the more credibility and authority search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing will attribute to your website, helping your content rank higher for the targeted keywords. A webpage, and later, a website, which gets tons of dofollow links, quickly gains credibility in the eyes of the search engines, thereby increasing their rankings on the SERPs. If another website links to your site, and does not decide to add the nofollow tag, the search engines will come naturally to your page and increase 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.
Keep in mind, all links are default to dofollow, so do not be alarmed when you see a nofollow or dofollow link. You can simply right-click any page, head over to Mangools SEO, and choose Highlight nofollow and dofollow. Since dofollow links have no specific attributes, if your search box comes up with a nil on the rel=nofollow parameter, then you know all links in this webpage are Dofollow. You can easily add both dofollow and nofollow links to Gutenberg by following these instructions.
The links still work in the same way, but Google views them differently depending on which tags are used, and as you might have guessed, the value of the dofollow links is higher than that of the nofollow links. By default, links are followed by search crawlers and transfer the link juice to the pages to which they are linked, but this default behavior does not apply when a Nofollow attribute value is specified. When links are nofollowed, it means they pass the votes of authority and trust, commonly called link juice, to the webpage they refer to. It is important that only if you are intentionally linking to them, and trust in the integrity of the web page, should you use dofollow.
Dofollow backlinks and nofollow backlinks are two ways to recognize the link and let Google know how to connect the site to which you are linking. As you have discovered, the main definition for what is a dofollow backlink is links from other websites passing page rank values back to your website for SEO purposes. The most common way of creating a dofollow backlink is by writing a guest post on a site which uses dofollow links within the content. To achieve a good position on a page, you should create a dofollow backlink (instructs spiders/bots to follow this link).
Since links are considered as dofollow by default, and affect SEO, you might want to make links that are relevant for competitors, but will not affect their rankings, e.g. If the link does not send PageRank (aka link authority) your way, then it will not contribute to your ranking in Google. There is a lot of relevancy between these two sites and the linked page, so that link is worth more overall than getting one from, say, a site about fitness. There might be cases when a dofollow reciprocal link is a good idea, particularly if you are looking to increase traffic to your website, and the outside site has similar rankings as your page.
You should use nofollow links in cases when a page or part of your website has a high amount of external links coming from it that are leading to suspect or irrelevant websites. For instance, a nofollow link from a high-visited site could potentially help you get some relevant referral traffic back to your site. While you will not receive the full SEO benefits of a dofollow link, a nofollow link could bring some traffic back to your site, while also diversifying your backlink portfolio.
If you are looking to nurture and encourage good, insightful comments or discussions from users on your site, you may instead wish to change their links to be dofollow by hand. Many CMS offer the option of notfollowing links when creating links, but if you need to code it by hand, we have a few examples for you. If you are using nofollow hoping Google will not crawl pages from your own site using the directive, please be aware that it used to be a signal for Google not to crawl the page through the particular link, but it does not stop Google from crawling the page through another method.
Adding the nofollow rel attribute to a link can prevent Google from following this link while scanning the site, and Google will not consider that link a vote for the page that it links to. The nofollow attribute tells search engines not to follow the outbound links it is labeled – it is basically saying the site does not endorse that link. Having a nofollow link on your site is essentially saying, Hey Google, I trust the web page on the other end of that link, so you should trust them a little too.
As we discussed before, a naturally occurring do-follow form of link is used by Google for measuring page rank. Google assesses the links coming in on each site in order to determine whether or not links look natural – meaning, an ordinary link profile, with links coming in from related websites, including both do follow and nofollow links, and a number of links which seem normal.
If there are two links on the web page pointing to same pages on other websites, and of those 2, 1 is nofollow, while the second is dofollow, Googles robots will take the 1st link into account, while the second is nofollow, and in this scenario, dofollow links are ignored by the Google robots, and there is no link juice passed. Now, we can define follow links: Follow links are links which are considered to point, which promotes SEO link juice and increases page ranking of linked sites, helping them rank higher in the SERPs accordingly.
