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what is dofollow and nofollow links in seo

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Good thread starter answers from , and — one clarification and some practical next steps.

Major update since this thread was posted: Google no longer treats rel="nofollow" as a strict on/off instruction. In September 2019 Google added rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" and said rel="nofollow" (and the new values) are treated as hints for ranking; from March 1, 2020 the nofollow signal is also treated as a hint for crawling/indexing. That means use the new attributes to describe link intent (paid vs user content) and do not rely on rel="nofollow" to block a page from being indexed — use a robots meta noindex or an X‑Robots‑Tag header instead. (developers.google.com)

To answer : quick ways to check a link

  • Right‑click → Inspect (or View Source) and look for the anchor's rel attribute.

  • Run a tiny console check to list every anchor and its rel value:

    const anchors = document.querySelectorAll('a');
anchors.forEach(a => console.log(a.href, a.rel || '(no rel)'));

    That uses the page DOM rel property, so it shows exactly what the browser sees. For one‑click visual checks use a nofollow/highlighter extension (for example, “Follow, Nofollow Link Checker” on Chrome). (developer.mozilla.org)

Best practices (practical, short)

  • Paid/affiliate links: mark them rel="sponsored" (or rel="nofollow sponsored" for backwards compatibility).
  • User‑generated links (comments, forum posts): mark them rel="ugc" (you can combine values, e.g. rel="ugc nofollow").
  • Don’t use rel alone to prevent indexing — use noindex/X‑Robots‑Tag where needed.
  • No need to rewrite every old nofollow; adopt the new attributes when you edit pages and keep moderation to limit spammy links. (developers.google.com)

Short caution: “dofollow” is just SEO shorthand for a link that has no rel value. Even such links may be treated differently by search engines depending on context, so mark paid and user content correctly and moderate external links.

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Member Avatar for hericles

rel="nofollow" is a tag that can be added to links to prevent web crawlers (spiders) from following a link and indexing that page. There is no dofollow tag, to get a spider to follow a link simply don't include nofollow.
Nofollow prevents pagerank being passed to the link from your page, plus a few other things all relating to search engines algorithms.

Member Avatar for johnmallan44

I agree everyone points you said for do follow and no follow links in seo. Suchlike it’s also helpful for who like to get potential traffic from online with follow search engine algorithm.

Member Avatar for couponsgrid

Dofollow and nofollow links are menat for web crawlers, when we mark a link nofollow then web crawler does not indexes that page and will not help you in getting benefit of link juise(PR), wherase dofollow links are messages to google so as to get link juice to your website.

Member Avatar for yeshamarques

Hello Friends
Thank You For Reply...
But How Check A Dofollow a Link. Any Add ons...

Member Avatar for yeshamarques

Hello Friends..

Thank You For sharing good knowledge...

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