Do Follow v/s No Follow – Let’s Take a Closer Look

So, now you are planning to make your site popular in the eye of search engines and hence you are on your way to build links to your site. Well, you must have heard of no-follow and do-follow in context of link building. Are you the one who is wondering about the difference between these two? Here is the answer then.

It is important to understand the difference between do-follow and no-follow tag, especially when they have a great influence over the search engine ranking method.

The normal syntax for an HTML link is as follows -

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>search engine optimization resources</a>

So what are the components included in this HTML structure?

1. HTML tag for referencing (opening)
2. URL to the targeted page
3. Anchor text
4. Closing tag

Now, when you are doing this, you are basically asking web spiders to crawl the link from your page by default. With the help of additional tag, you can control whether the web spider will crawl deeper from your site following a link or not. By default, it is a do-follow. So even when you are not adding a do-follow tag, it automatically crawls through it.

But when you are not so generous and do not want to allow spiders to crawl the link from your site, you have to use a no-follow tag in it. That is, it would be look like as follows -

<a href=”http://www.example.com” rel=”nofollow”>search engine optimization resources</a>

So, what’s the difference in terms of impact?

When you are leaving the instance of your site’s link to others’ websites, you need to check it out whether the site allows yours to get listed or not by using a no-follow tag. If they have a no-follow, it still may be a good idea to put your site’s instance there, but it may not be as useful if you are trying to boost in your search engine ranking with it.

These days many sites and blogs use no-follow tag in them in order to attract genuine engagement / discussion in their base. So it could be a real pain and a waste of time if you put your link on them with a desire to boost your search engine ranking. Otherwise, it could be good to put if you consider it from a different perspective – such as building exposure in community, putting instance to click, etc.

So, are the people usually not very generous to give others link juice? Not really, there might be different reasons -

If they are offering links against payment, they may choose to associate it with a no-follow tag. Why? It is because Google wants it that way. Basically allowing spiders to crawl through a link helps in passing a small amount of rank juice to the linked site, which is what boosts search engine ranking. This is highly discouraged by Google.

People may use no-follow tag while linking to major sites like Google.com, Yahoo.com, etc. They are already so much popular, that giving do-follow or no-follow does not make any difference to them.

It’s up to website owners / bloggers whether they use no-follow or do-follow tag. It’s just one’s own preference. But at the same time, it is also true that you should not take unfair advantage of do-follow, as it severely hurt the entire community, if done adversely.