do follow links
Do-follow links: One of the most important things you can acquire if you want to have a successful SEO campaign that ranks your website, brings you traffic & helps grow your business into a money-making machine.
In this article we will cover:
- What rel=”dofollow” means
- How dofollow links work
- When and where to get dofollow links
- …and more
Strap in and do follow along with us. #punintended
What Are Do-Follow Links?
If you have read our previous article about nofollow links, you should understand how REL attributes in HTML work.
Interesting point, a dofollow link actually has no rel attribute, because all links are “dofollow” by default.
So, a Dofollow link is just a hyperlink that has no REL attribute specifically telling it NOT to be a dofollow link.
Why Are Do Follow Links Important?
Having a do-follow link on your website is basically like you saying “Hey Google, I trust the webpage on the other side of this link, so you should trust them a bit too”.
Google kind of works like this:
Imagine for a moment that someone you didn’t know came up to you and said: “Hey you should check out this new restaurant called Luigis, they have great Italian food”.
Since you didn’t know the person, you might not really know whether you could trust them or not that Luigis is good.
But, what if 1,000 people you didn’t know came up to you on separate occasions and said: “Hey you should check out this new restaurant called Luigis, they have great Italian food”.
That might be enough 3rd party opinions for you to really trust this Luigi’s place.
So much so that you might even recommend it to someone even if you hadn’t tried it.
Google kind of works like that.
If enough websites are linking (aka “vouching for”, or “recommending”) to a particular site, they will begin to trust that site.
Google’s algorithm relies heavily on the “opinion” of other websites, and this is why getting links from other sites pointing to your site is very important for SEO.
How to Check if a Link is Do-follow
When you’re on a website, simply right-click and choose “Inspect”
Then, you can click on an element and look down at the code. In this example on our post about SEO Keyword Research, you will see us “inspecting” a link and in the screenshot, you will see inside the HTML of the link it says rel=”nofollow”
If the link was dofollow, you would NOT see “nofollow” inside the link HTML.
Here is an example of one that IS dofollow:
Notice when we zoom in on the HTML you do NOT see any indication that the link has been set to NOFOLLOW:
Final Thoughts
Don’t overthink this one guys & gals.
Dofollow links are links that have not been manually set to “nofollow”.
Do follow links (from quality & relevant websites) that point to you are good for building the SEO power of your website.