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What is the difference between do-follow & no-follow ?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by mikenielson143

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Several replies here (for example and ) captured the basic idea: link markup tells search engines how to treat an outbound link. Two important clarifications that weren't in the original thread: 1) "dofollow" is industry shorthand — it isn't a real HTML value; a normal <a> tag with no rel attribute is implicitly followable. 2) Google updated how it treats link attributes in 2019: rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" are now treated as hints, not absolute directives (and nofollow became a hint for crawling/indexing in 2020). (developer.mozilla.org)

Practical, modern guidance for sites and forum owners:

  • Use rel="sponsored" for paid/affiliate links, rel="ugc" for user-generated content (comments, forum posts), and rel="nofollow" when you explicitly don't want to vouch for a link. Multiple values can be combined.
  • Don't add rel="nofollow" to editorial links you want to reward — that prevents the link from being treated as an endorsement in most cases.
    Example HTML:
    <a href="https://example.com">normal (dofollow) link</a>
<a href="https://example.com" rel="ugc nofollow">forum comment link</a>
<a href="https://sponsor.com" rel="sponsored nofollow">paid placement</a>

    For the official explanation and recommended uses, see Google's announcement. (developers.google.com)

A few troubleshooting notes and cautions (addresses misconceptions in earlier posts like ): rel="nofollow" does not reliably prevent a linked page from being crawled or indexed — use a page-level noindex meta or proper robots controls if you need to keep a page out of search results. Also, nofollow/sponsored/ugc links still drive referral traffic and can help discoverability even if they don't pass editorial ranking credit in the usual way. If legacy behavior is causing issues (e.g., internal pages you thought were hidden), inspect the URL in Search Console and switch to noindex where appropriate. (developers.google.com)

Recommended Answers

All 13 Replies

Member Avatar for JorgeM

Basically tells the search engine spiders whether or not to follow a link on your page. The no-follow is typically used on forums and threads to prevent spammers from gaining back-links an adding to their page rank.

Member Avatar for vanilla23

Dofollow Link is a hyperlink that is able to tell search engines to pass along it's page rank influence to an outbound link.

Nofollow Link is exactly the opposite. It is a hyperlink that removes the ability to pass on it's page rank status to other sites.

Member Avatar for Jashandeep

Do-follow links are counted as a back links by Google.On other hand side no follow links are not consider as a back links.

Member Avatar for OliviaSSLGuru

Do follow will aid to get boost in Search Engine Ranking Posting for particular key phrase where No follow will aid to gain link popularity.

Member Avatar for Jenelia89

Do Follow Link will be a link that the Search Engines will be able to follow and crawl and as a SEO benefits will be transferred to the website that the link is pointing .

No follow link do not share page rank.

Member Avatar for rileyoneal

Gaining link equity vs not gaining much

Member Avatar for sharma.gaurav

Always prefer dofollow, Google counts it and boost your keyword.

Member Avatar for adumdavis

I think Do follow link is a hyperlink that can crawled by search engines and which is helpful for increasing the page rank of site while No follow link is a hyperlink that cann't crawled by search engine. No follow link is only used for increasing the visiters.

Edited by Ezzaral because: Removed link spam.
Member Avatar for jamesr12

No Follow Links are the links which does not allows the Search Engine to Visit the site it is linked to.
And Do Follow Links are the links which allows the Search Engine to Visit the site it is linked to

Member Avatar for kaamkar

the links which google accepts are follow

Member Avatar for ibuzonebob

Nofollow is a tag that simply tells search engines not to crawl, or notice, a link on a page.
Dofollow means this link haven't use nofollow tag. Links from DoFollow sites do get noticed by search engines, thus boosting their value

Member Avatar for sukasol

Do follow is used to make the link for search engines. And its really great to increase page rank as well.

No follow is used to make the link for general traffic and no search engine/bot will crawl those page.

So botgh should be use as required.

SNIP

Edited by happygeek because: fake sig (spam) deleted
Member Avatar for mikenielson143

Dofollow Link is a hyperlink that is able to tell all search engines to pass along it’s page rank influence to an outbound link.If you will use or get do follow links then search engines will count your link in the eyes of google, yahoo, bing etc as backlink for your site and you can get some positive value for your site ranking.And other hand nofollow link is exactly the opposite. It is a hyperlink that removes the ability to pass on it’s page rank status to other sites.Nofollow links are for not crawling a link by search engine that influence the ranking of a particular website or blog in search engines.

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