What are dofollow blogs? what does the nofollow tag mean? Do you care? Should you care?
No discussion about link building and website promotion would be complete without mentioning the dreaded nofollow tag but if you’re confused about nofollow and dofollow don’t feel bad because they can be … well … confusing!
When you are trying to build links to your website, you have 2 goals in mind. One of these is to get traffic that is interested in your offer, the other is to build up “clout” in the eyes of the Search Engines so that your site can rise to the top of the search results.
It used to be that all links you got to your site passed on some level of PageRank or “link juice” but I guess that made it too easy for hard working webmasters so “the powers that be” decided to implement something called a nofollow tag.
This tag is an attribute used in the hyperlink and it tells the search engine spider not to follow or pass along link juice through the link (Some SE’s will spider the link and some wont but in theory none of them will use it in their calculations for site importance). This is important because if you are getting links from blogs, websites, social media sites etc… and you are depending on that “link juice” then you need to know if they are dofollow blogs, sites, etcc…. Or if they are using the nofollow tag.
So How Do You Tell If A Site Is “Nofollow” Or “Dofollow”
It’s pretty easy to tell – you simply view the source and see if the links have the nofollow tag. To view the source of a page, bring the page up in your browser and then right click your mouse button and select “View Page Source”. Then search the page for a link and see if the hyperlink code looks like:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/loveyourdog/51215392/ …..
If you see the “nofollow” tag then that link will not be spidered by search engines nor will it pass any PR. If there is not a “nofollow”, then it is “dofollow” by default.
Now, you have to be careful because sometimes a site will have nofollow links in one part and dofollow in another. Squidoo is a prime example of this – if you put a hyper link in one of the text boxes it is “dofollow” but in the lists, links and rssfeeds it is all “nofollow”.
Should You Care?
While you should be aware of this attribute in the links you are getting, I don’t think you should ONLY go for “dofollow” links. That would be unnatural and while there apparently is no penalty for that now, you never know what the SE’s are going to do.
Plus, the second reason for getting links is to attract targeted traffic to your site and a “nofollow” link can do that just as good as a “dofollow”.
The Other Side Of The Coin
This issues actually has 2 sides you want to think about. One of them is discussed above and involves the links you get TO your site. The other involves the links that go out of your site.
Yep, you’ve probably guessed it, if your links don’t have the “nofollow” tag attribute, then each link that leads away from your website bleeds out a little bit of “juice”.
The Final Verdict
When searching for links you want to try to find “dofollow” links but don’t discount put a good quality link on a high traffic site that is very targeted to what you are offering on your site – you might get some good traffic from it.
When commenting on blogs, I usually seek out dofollow blogs to get the most bang for the buck, but if I run across some nofollows that are targeted to my niche then I don’t hesitate to comment – after all, it only takes a minute to make a good comment!
