What are DoFollow Links?
Table of Contents
“DoFollow” Links #
DoFollow Links don’t exist. They are just Follow Links
Somebody came up with “DoFollow”, but the wrong wording even leads to broken HTML coding by non-experienced webmasters.
Wrong markup like this was seen in the wild wild web:
<a rel="dofollow" href="http://my.super.site.com">example link that should be FOLLOWED by bots</a>
The correct term to use is “Follow Link”.
You also don’t have to do anything to make a link follow-able, i.e. “do follow”. It is followed by robots, by default.
The term “Do Follow” is also confusing, as it implies an imperative to the crawlers, a directive to force the bots to crawl such a links. Forcing bots to crawl a link is not as easy, it takes a bit more, like the technology in Link Detox Boost.
This is how a normal Follow Link looks like:
<a href="http://example.com">example link that is a FOLLOW link</a>
The coding above is the correct for a Follow link. No REL-attribute (as with NoFollow link) is required, and especially not the attributes “dofollow” as some may imply.
Refer to the link type specification in the HTML spec of the W3C here.
Please DO let us know if you find a “dofollow” HTML specification somewhere :)
How do I create a dofollow link?
Instead of using a third-party application, this is one of the simplest tricks.
All you have to do is delete ‘rel=nofollow’ from the HTML.
This method is literally changing the coding part and if you’re not the one with your technical expertise, the above steps can be a little difficult. That’s because there are many elements to take care of if you’re creating do-follow links.
What are dofollow and nofollow links?
Links considered “Dofollow” allows search engines like Google and Bing search engines to count the links for their ranking effect.
If you add a “nofollow” attribute to a link, it is usually ignored by search engines for ranking purpose (but sometimes not).
How can I check if the link is of dofollow or nofollow?
- Manually: in a web browser, if you right click and select “Inspect” you can reach the source code of the link. There you can review the HTML element and view it’s properties. If you look at the properties and don’t see rel=“nofollow” in the source code then the link is a dofollow link.
- Automated: using Browser extensions it’s a lot more convenient. E.g. the LRT Link Checker extension for Chrome or Firefox gives you the option to review that source code on mouse-over with your cursor, and also highlight links in different colors, depending on their type.
- Even more automated: a link analysis software like LinkResearchTools allows you to do mass evaluation of links for Nofollow or (Do)follow.