Nofollow Links Vs Dofollow Links: Are Nofollow Links Usable?

If you want to promote your site through off-page seo then you, you have come across the term “Backlink”. But what is it? And how is it useful?

Before I answer that let’s imagine a scenario. Suppose you are a newly graduated student and you are looking to work as a live streamer. But since you are a beginner when you started you didn’t get many views on your live streams. And it’s quite natural no one knows of your existence. So you ask a favor from a friend who is a well-known streamer to mention your channel in one of his streams. And the next thing you know the number of views your streams has gone up.

So what did we get from this scenario? We learned that recommendations from more renowned personnel on the same field as you can play a huge role in promoting you. That’s the main concept of backlinks.

Backlinks are generally external links that point towards your site. And high authoritative site recommends you the more search engine notices you, which in turn convinces the search engine to give you a better ranking.

But why do search engines value this so much? Getting mention from a high authoritative site is easier said than done. You can’t just expect that if you tell them you want a recommendation and they would give it to you with open arms. Why would they? You are a rival. And who would in their right mind pave the way for his rival to defeat him? That’s why if you can get a backlink from such high authoritative site the search engine knows that you had put a lot of effort to get it.

By now you should have a basic understanding of what backlinks are. But here’s the thing not all backlinks pointing to your site affect its ranking directly. That is why links are divided into two types dofollow links and nofollow links.

Dofollow Links

By the name you should have already guessed that the dofollow links are the ones that directly affect your ranking in the search engine while the nofollow links don’t. But how does one differentiate them?

Nofollow Links

Well, you can differentiate whether a link is a nofollow link by looking up their anchor tags. Nofollow links would have the “ rel=’nofollow’ ” attribute in them. The reason for such links to be used is to prevent spamming on blogs, comments, social media, etc. In the past for ranking keywords people would comment or write posts on any blog site they could think of without caring whether the site or post is related to their niche. Like if a new website like “Streaming Plug” which is built as an online streaming platform were to go to a post about furniture and comment on it, would it would be relevant. I think no thus nofollow links were used. So, are this links completely useless?

Are Nofollow Links Usable?

There was a time that people thought that nofollow links are completely useless. Cause search engines don’t value it as a ranking factor. But that’s not completely right. Yeah, a search engine like google doesn’t hold it as a ranking fact but with, but its recent penguin update, it has included a site that has only dofollow links is quite suspicious. Cause a site that has organic traffic should have a mix of both links if the traffic and links were generated by following the rules and policy of the search engine.

You already know that your rival won’t give you a dofollow link that easily. And sites with high authority that allow you to link for nothing have set those links as nofollow. But that doesn’t mean that theirs no merit in getting a link in them even if they are nofollow links. Since they are high authoritative sites they have a lot of traffic and among them, some would be interested in visiting through the link. Though the links themselves might not affect the ranking, the increase of traffic on your site will. In short nofollow link is one of the best ways to get organic traffic on your site.

And because of this others will become aware of your presence because of which your popularity will increase. Thus giving you a higher chance of getting a dofollow link.