Dofollow Links

What Are Dofollow Links

Dofollow links are followed by search engine crawlers, can pass on link equity from one website to another, and are ideal for link building purposes when performance is important.

They help both on cross-domain level but also on an intra-website level.

A Dofollow link has the rel=”dofollow”, or rel=”follow” tag.

<a href=”http://www.URL.com/” rel=”dofollow”>anchor text</a>

If a link doesn’t have neither of these tags, nor the rel=”nofollow” tag, it is considered to be “dofollow” anyway.

What’s the Difference Between Dofollow and Nofollow links?

Opposed to them are Nofollow links. They are generally not followed by search engine crawlers, they don’t often pass on link equity from one website to another, and they’re ideal for paid or sponsored content as well for user-generated content (UGC).

Although, sponsored and UGC links need to be marked with their own rel tags, “rel=sponsored” and “rel=ugc”, accordingly.

They can’t harm the user experience as the link attributes applied to them aren’t visible to users and website visitors, but note that pages with nofollow links pointing to them can still be indexed.

Pagerank is a numerical value that represents how important a webpage is, also commonly referred to as “link juice”.

The higher the pagerank, the more important the webpage is, and the higher it will show up in search.

Pagerank is calculated by taking into account the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage. The more inbound links there are, and the higher the quality of those inbound links, the higher the PageRank.

Pagerank affects SEO in that it is one of the factors that search engines use to determine the importance of a webpage. The higher the pagerank, the more likely it is that a webpage will appear higher in search engine results pages.

Dofollow links pass PageRank from one page to another.

When a webpage links to another webpage with a dofollow link, it is effectively saying that the linked-to webpage is important. This increases the PageRank of the linked-to webpage.

NoFollow links, on the other hand, do not pass PageRank to linked pages.

Dofollow Links Benefits

There are many benefits associated with having an expansive dofollow link profile:

1. Dofollow links help improve your site’s search engine rankings.

2. Dofollow links help increase your site’s PageRank.

3. Dofollow links help increase the visibility of your site in search engine results pages.

4. Dofollow links help drive traffic to your site.

5. Dofollow links help build relationships with other websites.

6. Dofollow links help create social proof for your site.

7. Dofollow links help increase the trustworthiness of your site.

8. Dofollow links help you rank for keywords that are in your links’ anchor texts.

Dofollow Link Example

The following is an example of one of our dofollow backlinks.

It does not have a “dofollow” tag – but it’s still considered dofollow.

How To Use Dofollow Links?

Since Dofollow backlinks pass on ranking signals, they should be your priority while link building.

Aim for Dofollow Links When Link Building

Every time you gain a link through your link building outreach, make sure to check if it’s Dofollow or not.

You can do so by clicking on the page with your right mouse button, then clicking “Inspect”, and searching for your URL in the “Elements” tab with ctrl-shift-r.

But, even though nofollow links don’t hold the same kind of SEO influence, they are still valuable – people can still click on them and find out about your site.

A healthy backlink profile consists mainly of dofollow backlinks, but also has some nofollow links as well.

As long as your number of dofollow backlinks outnumbers nofollow ones, your backlink profile can be considered healthy.

Should You Provide Dofollow Links From Your Own Site?

When it comes to internal links (links from one of your pages to another one of your pages), it is recommended that you leave them as Dofollow.

There are a few key reasons to keep your internal links Dofollow:

1. It helps search engines crawl and index your website more effectively.

2. Dofollow links help spread PageRank and link equity throughout your website, which can improve your overall search engine ranking.

3. Dofollow links can also help boost the individual ranking of the pages that they link to.

As for external links (links from your website to another website), there are cases where you can keep them Dofollow, and there are situations where it would be preferable to Nofollow them.

When you are linking to another website, you should consider whether or not you want to pass along link equity. If you want to pass along link equity, you should make the link a Dofollow link.

If you don’t want to pass along link equity, you should make the link a Nofollow link.

In general, if you’re linking to a highly-authoritative website with a higher Domain Rating (or one that is comparable to your own), it’s perfectly fine to keep the link Dofollow.

If the site you’re linking to is of a lower quality and Domain Rating, it would be preferable to Nofollow that link.

However, there really is no golden rule when it comes to using links on your own website as it ultimately comes down to whether you’re fine with passing on PageRank or not.

Imagine your website as a bucket. Each inbound link is a drop of water in that bucket.

Each outbound dofollow link from your site is like a little hole in that bucket.

And while linking out to a few authoritative websites isn’t going to harm your SEO in any way, excessive outbound linking may cause your traffic growth to stagnate.

A healthy outbound link profile consists of both Dofollow and Nofollow links.

How to Earn Dofollow links?

There are many strategies to acquire dofollow links from other websites.

Let’s look at one of the best ones: the anchor text strategy, and how exactly you can perform it with Respona.

Respona comes with a built-in search engine that can actually scrape results for you automatically, without you even needing to manually select any prospects.

For this hypothetical campaign, let’s do some link building for our SaaS Marketing blog post – we have already secured over 15 dofollow backlinks using this exact process.

1. In Step 1 – Find Content, click over to Automation Setup.

2.Select “Keyword Search”

3. Select Google or Bing. We’ll use Google.

4. Note: Google and Bing use different advanced search operators. You can find them under “Advanced Search”.

5. Type in your queries. You can use the following search operators to get very specific with the kinds of results you want to get.

inurl:blog (tells the search engine to only show pages that are part of a blog)
intext: (specifies which keyword should be included in the articles’ bodies)
intitle: (specifies which keyword should be included in the articles’ titles)
-intitle: (specifies which keyword should not be included in the articles’ titles)

A few simple search strings would look like this:

1. inurl:blog intext:”saas marketing” -intitle:”saas marketing”

2. inurl:blog intext:”saas marketing” intitle:”content”

3. inurl:blog intext:”promoting your saas” intitle:”software”

This tells Respona to look for blog posts that mention “SaaS marketing “ in their bodies but exclude or include certain phrases in the titles of the articles.

Note: If you wish to narrow down the search even more, you can add additional tags to specific strings which filter down the search to a general topic.

inurl:blog intext:”saas marketing” -intitle:”saas marketing” intitle:”SEO”