DoFollow Versus NoFollow: The Age Old SEO Question

In my opinion, there are three GOLDEN rules when it comes to the concept of search engine optimization. (1) Provide genuine, quality content to the visitors who read your blog, (2) make sure those quality-enriched blog posts are not only written for your readers, but also for the search engines by utilizing keyword optimization and (3) establish your backlink infrastructure for your blog or website by using both dofollow and nofollow links to gain authority and trust within the search engines.

Often times, the first two rules are often easy to implement once you get the hang of them, but the latter can be somewhat difficult to figure out, especially for novice internet marketers. Backlinks are links from external websites that link back to your blog or website (often times referred to as your money site) to obtain page rank authority.

There are several things you must consider when implementing an seo link building strategy that best aligns with your blog content and the audience that you’re trying to target. Often times, finding the right backlinks for your site rely on two important principles:

The page rank authority of the blog – this is a scoring system used by Google to determine a website’s page authority by taking into account the number of related visits and the age of the website’s domain. Google uses the ranking system of PR (Page Rank) 0-10.
Determine whether the site or blog is dofollow or nofollow – In order for search engines to crawl your website and earn page authority from other, more trusted sites, Googlebot must be able to follow the click from your external backlink page to your blog or website. If the link is set to nofollow, Google in most instances, won’t be able to crawl the site. Therefore keeping you from getting any page rank authority from that particular site.

The Importance of DoFollow Links And NoFollow Links

There’s been a swarm of controversy behind how much “link juice” (term referring to how much page authority a backlink site transfers to your blog or website) dofollow links provide over nofollow links when it comes to search engine optimization. Many seo experts debate over how effective using both dofollow and nofollow links to increase the page rank of a website is still considered a hot topic even to this day. I find that having the right mixture of both dofollow and nofollow backlinks is the best way to gain exposure to your blog. While nofollow backlinks don’t transfer any page rank to your site, they can still offer a great deal of much needed traffic to your site.

Many internet marketers and businesses place too much emphasis on using dofollow links in their seo link building strategy. Although having all dofollow links pointing back to your site to boost your page rank is ideal, it’s doesn’t guarantee you the number one position on the first page of Google and is often times damn near impossible to rank your content using all dofollow backlinks.

A really good seo link building tool that I use to gauge what kinds of backlinks I’m looking for is MajesticSEO. This tool can help you determine what type of backlinks and placement of your backlinks by investigating your competitor’s backlink infrastructure. For example, if you type your URL into the field at the top of the page, you can evaluate your site’s citation flow (quantity of backlinks) to your trust flow (quality of backlinks). Most sites, depending on there age usually have ample citation flow, but the trick is too build up your trust flow by finding other websites that offer a high trust flow while providing dofollow links. You can tell when a site provides dofollow links by looking at the “Links” column when you click on the Backlinks tab. Notice if the link is nofollow or has been deleted, this will be indicated in that column. If there is nothing provided in that column, then it’s considered to be a dofollow link. I could write a whole blog post on this tool alone, but it’s very intuitive once you get the hang of it.

Anyway, as I was saying, some of the best websites that have high page rank authority have an even mix of dofollow and nofollow links. Take for instance, Google’s Matt Cutt’s blog has a very high citation and trust flow from MajesticSEO because his blog has links from both dofollow and nofollow backlink websites. Notice the image taken from Majestic SEO below:

Notice in this graph how his blog has an several dots that lay on both sides of the diagonal line separating his citation flow from his trust flow. This is where you want your blog or website to be when it comes to finding dofollow and nofollow backlinks. Having the 50/50 blend is really the ideal for a seo link building strategy. I will go more in depth on this on the next post. And remember, my blog is a dofollow blog, so if you would like to exchange links or become a guest blog, please feel free to contact me. Let me know what your opinion is about dofollow and nofollow backlinks. I would really like to get your opinion and what strategies are you using in your link building process. Hope this helps!