When laying out the backlink strategy for your business or that of your clients, one thing must be present—do-follow links.
Why? Of all the links you’ll get to build, do-follow links are crawlable and can help search engines discover more of your content, and transfer link equity from the linking site, influencing the page rankings.
To answer your questions about do-follow links, in this article, you’ll get a complete overview of the following:
- What is Dofollow backlink and how does it work?
- The importance of do-follow links
- Ways to get do-follow links for off-site search engine optimization (SEO).
The ultimate goal here is to help you understand every aspect of do-follow backlinks and how they apply to your SEO campaign.
Let’s dive right into it.
What Is a Dofollow Link (and How Does it Differ With a NoFollow Link)?
Let’s start with a simple question. What is a do follow backlink?
A do follow link is a backlink that points back to your website for Google (and other search engines) to crawl and pass the PageRank authority of the linking site to the destination site.
So, if a webmaster links your website with a do-follow link, that means they have allowed both search engines and human users to follow that link.
Turns out, every URL on the Internet has a PageRank score and each time that URL links to another page on the web (with a do-follow attribute), it transfers a portion of that PageRank value for SEO.
At the end of the day? Traffic and authority flow to the receiving end.
What is a Dofollow Link Example?
By default, all hyperlinks are DoFollow. The difference comes in when you have to insert the attribute rel=”nofollow” for NoFollow links.
Typically, a do-follow link does not have a “nofollow,” “UGC,” or “sponsored” attribute. Here’s an example of a do-follow link in HTML:
In this example, you’ll realize that the rel attribute is set to dofollow, which instructs search engines to follow the link and pass on the link juice to the linked website.
How is this different from a no-follow link?
Differences between DoFollow and NoFollow links
In the past, unscrupulous SEOs exploited do-follow links to gain a bigger link juice boost by spamming more reputable sites through spam links, paid links, or comments with links back to their sites in turn boosting their profile.
Although that has been in existence, since the introduction of no-follow links, there has been so much confusion between the terms.
Let’s square that out.
While a do-follow link passes on some of the authority and traffic of the web page that contains them to which it links, a no-follow link instructs search engines not to follow the link to its destination and, in turn, not boost its PageRank.
In other words, do-follow links directly improve SEO because they share link juice whereas no-follow links only have indirect SEO value. However, in terms of referring traffic to your website, do-follow and no-follow links act the same.
To help you understand the differences clearly, let’s take a look at the following table.
| Criteria | Do Follow | No Follow |
| Purpose | To pass PageRank | Not to pass PageRank |
| SEO Value | High | Low |
| Crawled | Always crawled | May or may not be crawled |
| Indexing | Always used for indexing
| Not always used for indexing |
| Anchor Tag Attribute
| None required
| rel=”nofollow” |
Now that you understand what do-follow links in SEO are and how they differ from a no-follow link, let’s move on to the importance of a do-follow link.
Why Are Do-follow Links Important?
As we have discussed before, do-follow links are a fundamental part of your SEO strategy. They are important in the following sense:
- They act as a trust signal for search engine algorithms.
- They give the target page higher Page Authority.
- They give the overall website higher Domain Authority.
- They’re a vote of confidence or endorsement for the target page for quality and authoritativeness of content.
- They transfer link equity (PageRank) from one website to another, an attribute used by search engines to index and rank pages on the internet for target keywords.
Look at it this way, having a do-follow backlink from a highly authoritative site will boost your SERP rankings. So, if it is easier for potential customers to find your site in search engine results, the more traffic (and sales) you’ll generate.
How do I create a do-follow link?
Having a decent do-follow link profile from quality websites will give you a leg up in the competition to rank on the SERPS. But how do you go about creating one?
In most cases, no action is required to create a do follow link meaning, all hyperlinks are naturally do-follow. So, if your site gets a link from another site that does not instruct the search engines not to crawl it with a no-follow tag, the spiders will eventually get to your page and “donate” some PageRank score and refer traffic to your site.
The same is true if you’re linking from your own site to another site. You can decide to include the no-follow attribute tag to your links or leave them as they are and once search engines discover them, they’ll transfer the same benefits to the other.
The goal here is to ensure that you’re only adding or accepting links to and from reputable and relevant sites as links that lead to low-quality or spammy content can have a negative impact on your link juice, trust signals, and authority.
Let’s take a look at some of the link-building and outreach strategies you can use to build do-follow links to your site:
- Use guest blogging for link-building
- Create branded web 2.0 sites for links
- Claim broken links on other websites
- Build dofollow links with image-sharing sites
- Add your website to the Google Publish Center
- Create an expert roundup for dofollow links
- Create a publicity event to get organic backlinks
- Use HARO to get high-authority dofollow backlinks
- Be interviewed yourself to get links on other websites
- Use email outreach to get dofollow links from industry partners
- Interview influencers in your niche to get links back to your published article, podcast, or video
- Turn brand mentions into backlinks by asking site owners to link to your homepage
- Get listed on business directories
- Find your competitor’s dofollow links and reach out to the same websites to get listed on them too
- Create links on dofollow forums by posting hyperlinks to relevant content that answers users’ questions
So, far so good in this article, we’ve covered the following:
- What is a do follow backlink
- An example of a do follow backlink
- Key differences between a do follow and no follow backlink
- Importance of do follow backlinks, and
- How to build do-follow backlinks
As we edge close to wrapping up this discussion, let’s take a moment and reflect on the overview provided above. As you do so, let’s talk about how to identify whether your link is a do-follow or not.
How Do You Identify a Do-follow Link?
Before we get to how to identify a do-follow link, when we talk about dofollow links, quality always trumps quantity.
Here are some criteria you can use to determine a quality dofollow link:
- It comes from a website in the same niche
- It shows up early in the website content
- It comes from an authoritative and well-maintained website
- It comes from a website that doesn’t give dofollow links to many websites
- It has a label similar to or related to the keyword your content is targeting
Now that you understand how to determine the quality of your do-follow backlinks, let’s check some options available to identify them.
1. Use “inspect” in your browser
To find out whether a link on your page is do-follow or no-follow, right-click on the link and select “Inspect” in your browser.
This will open the rendered code of the page with the current element highlighted. If there’s no “nofollow” attribute in the HTML code, then that means your link or the link you’re checking is a do-follow link.
2. Use Tools for Checking Dofollow Links
If you want to check the status of the links on your site, you can use your CMS admin page to check if the no-follow tag attribute is present or not.
However, when it comes to links from an external page where you can’t see or edit the code, you can use the following tools:
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Moz
- SEO SpyGlass
- SE Ranking
- Mangools LinkMiner
- MonitorBacklinks
- Ubersuggest
- LinkGraph
- Sitechecker
These tools have made it easier for you to check the link status and the number of do-follow links on your site’s link profile.
On top of that, you gain valuable insights into the following metrics:
- Dofollow vs nofollow link ratios
- New vs lost backlinks
- Link velocity, and
- Domain Authority, and Page Authority scores for incoming links
- Comparison of those metrics to other sites
3. Chrome extensions
Lastly, you can use free Chrome extensions like MozBar to check if the links on your site are do-follow or not.
Final Thoughts
In this article, we started by giving you the do-follow backlinks meaning, and we said they are a very important element in organic positioning and more specifically link building.
That’s because it’s this criteria that is used by search engines like Google and Bing to increase the authority of websites through the creation of high-quality links that point to them.
Having many quality dofollow backlinks, therefore, will help you get top rankings in the search results easier which means more traffic (if you’re targeting the right keyword) and eventually increased revenue.
Now, it’s upon you to go out and use the various strategies highlighted in this article to build links that will make a difference for your SEO or that of your clients.
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