In natural referencing, internal and external links represent one of the pillars of your SEO strategy. The different links that point to your pages directly impact the visibility of your site in search engines.
In this context, there are two main attributes to name links: dofollow and nofollow.
These two notions allow to give indications to search engines about the value of the link. In other words, if you want to improve your visibility in search engine results, you’d better master the subject!
What is a dofollow link?
Presentation of the dofollow
The dofollow is, on the vast majority of CMS, the attribute designated by default.
Dofollow is an anglicism that means “to make the link”. It tells Google to make the link between your page and the URL indicated. Therefore, it will be taken into account in the Google algorithm and it allows to transmit Pagerank.
In simple terms, the Pagerank represents the popularity of a page on the web. Depending on the different internal and external links that point to it, it will be more or less popular with a more or less important Pagerank. As soon as a page has a dofollow link to another page, it will transmit Pagerank.
The power transmitted will then differ depending on the relevance of the site, the page, the location of the link, etc..
How to add a dofollow link?
A dofollow link is simply a link that has no attributes. By default, if it does not contain “nofollow” or even more recently the tags “sponsored” and “ugc” that I present a little lower in the article, it will be considered as dofollow and therefore followed by search engines.
By adding, for example:
<a href="https://www.google.com/" rel="dofollow">Anchor Text</a>
What is a nofollow link?
If the mention dofollow is by default present in the majority of sites, another mention exists: nofollow.
Presentation of nofollow
Nofollow is another anglicism that means, in contrast to the previous one, “do not follow”. This attribute indicates to search engines like Google that they should not follow the link.
The nofollow was created in 2005. For nearly 15 years, it was proposed by Google to fight against spam or to indicate sponsored or affiliated links. The fact of proposing two different attributes for the links allowed Google to better understand the links on the whole Web.
When a Google robot detects a nofollow link on a page, it is supposed to pretend it didn’t notice it and continue analyzing the rest of the content. I say “supposed to” because since March 2020, it’s not as clear as before.
When to use nofollow?
Initially, the nofollow was for example intended to be placed on :
Blog or forum comments;
Sponsored or affiliated links;
Links to pages that do not match your content;
Sites that you want to quote without contributing to their visibility;
Etc.
From my point of view, it is now unnecessary to use nofollow on your site.
Since this attribute is intended to be placed on a link that points to a page without interest for SEO, then you might as well avoid adding this link.
The only case where nofollow can still be present is in the comments of your blog articles, forums or in the noindex tag.
Another important element to take into account if you still think to optimize your Pagerank with this attribute, know that the nofollow causes a loss in your internal linkage.
What does a nofollow link look like?
The nofollow mention is added to a link thanks to the tag rel=”nofollow”. To use the example previously mentioned, this corresponds to:
<a href="https://www.google.com/" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a>
If you happen to be netlinking and getting links from other sites, you can easily check if the link is dofollow or nofollow. Just right click on the page, click on “inspect” and select the link.
