Knowing your backlinks – do follow vs no follow

Backlinks are an essential tool for any website owner looking to reach the upper echelons of Google’s search rankings. Unfortunately, not all backlinks were created equally and therefore grasping the fundamental differences between them can help you to save considerable time and money pursuing avenues with no or little benefit.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at the key differences between Do Follow and No Follow backlinks, and how you can use each of them to raise the profile of your website.

What Is A Do Follow link?

Whenever your site is linked to from an external site, it receives a little bump in its SEO ‘score’. Receiving links from major authority websites such as the BBC or Sky Sports will result in bigger bumps, driving your site closer and closer to the summit of Google’s search results.

Arranging backlinks from third party websites is one of the most commonly used ways for SEO experts to quickly improve a site’s ranking. The problem is that this type of SEO can lead to serial spamming, particularly on blog and YouTube comment sections as well as Wikipedia reference pages.

What Is A No Follow link?

No Follow links were created to combat the spread of spam across the web as people sort to create backlinks to their own site in every forum and comments section that they could get their hands on.

These links are created with a ‘nofollow’ code, basically telling Google and other search engines not to allocate any SEO bumps to the site being linked to. In practice, this has been designed to deter rogue SEO companies from using this underhand backlinking practice, but this doesn’t mean that No Follow backlinks should be avoided altogether.

Regardless of their non-effect from an SEO perspective, they can still act as a vital traffic generation tool. A well placed, relevant comment with a link to your site can attract plenty of potential customers whilst unique, engaging content will naturally attract readers, and therefore links, to your site.

How do I check to see if a link is Do Follow or No Follow?

It’s incredibly easy to find out if a link is a Do Follow or No Follow thanks to Google Chrome’s inspect tool. Simply right click on the page in question then select ‘inspect’ from the drop down menu. From the edit menu, search ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ and you’ll be taken straight to any links which are specified under those headings.

If you want to find out more about backlinking or anything else related to SEO, contact Excalibur Digital today.