Member Avatar for sonam_2

Hi, can anyone please tell me what is the majaor diffrence between no-follow and do-follow?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by arulkaruppannan

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Short answer in plain terms: a "dofollow" link is just a normal link (no special rel flag) that can pass link equity; rel="nofollow" is an instruction from the page owner asking search engines not to treat the link as an editorial endorsement. asked this and gave a simple start, but important nuance was missed: Google now treats nofollow (and the newer sponsored and ugc values) as signals or "hints" rather than absolute commands. (developers.google.com)

Terms and effects (short, practical): there is no HTML dofollow attribute — a link is "followed" by default when you omit rel and it may pass ranking signals. rel="nofollow" originally prevented PageRank transfer, but search engines may now treat it as a hint and sometimes crawl or consider those links in limited ways. That nuance matters when auditing backlinks or planning link policy. (ahrefs.com)

Practical rules and corrections to earlier points:

  • Use rel="sponsored" for paid/advertising links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content; you can combine values (for example rel="ugc sponsored").
  • Don’t use nofollow to block a page from indexing — use a robots meta tag or robots.txt for that.
  • Avoid using nofollow as internal "PageRank sculpting"; it’s not a reliable way to funnel authority.
  • DA/PA are third‑party metrics from Moz, not Google metrics — useful for benchmarking, but not the same as how Google treats links. (developers.google.com)

Examples and quick checklist (audit & label):

<a href="https://example.com">dofollow (default)</a>
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">nofollow</a>
<a href="https://example.com" rel="sponsored">sponsored</a>
<a href="https://example.com" rel="ugc">ugc</a>
<a href="https://example.com" rel="ugc sponsored nofollow">multiple values</a>

Checklist: audit outgoing links, label paid/UGC links correctly, track referral traffic from nofollow links (they still bring visitors and can seed earned links), and prioritise editorially-earned (followed) links for direct SEO impact. (ahrefs.com)

Member Avatar for arulkaruppannan

NoFollow:

A link which cannot be followed by bots is called as NoFollow links. But humans can follow them. The bot will read a link and will not come back to that link if it is NoFollow. We use this type of links to tell google that 'don't influence these links'. NoFollow links prevent sharing our URL values(DA,PA) to an outbound link. Only 1 backlink will be created from connected URL.

DoFollow:

A link which can be followed by both bots and humans is called as DoFollow link. Whenever the bot access that link, number of backlinks will be increased.

Most of them think that NoFollow links are not useful. But still this will be useful if it is relevant.

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