Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Dofollow and Nofollow links
-
What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links? I know that some sites/blogs only let you post nofollow links. In such a case how do I know if a comment I posted on a certain site will be a nofollow or dofollow? How about big traffic sites such as Huff Post. Do they only allow nofollow links?
-
Dofollow letting the bot crawl the target page
-
Thank you for the help Tom!
-
dofollow links pass "SEO Juice".
nofollow links do not pass "SEO Juice".
If your curious as to whether or not a particular blog allows for dofollow links, you can view the source code of the webpage using any common web browser. Find the link in question, and look to see if it includes "rel=nofollow". If that tag doesn't exist, then the link is dofollow.
-
Presuming that you're going to be linking to your website in the comment, I'd probably keep it limited to your own niche, but there's definitely room for a few comments from other industries.
If your comments are engaging, provide value to that blog's community and are not on blogs that are spammed to death, then you won't be doing any harm. The key is to comment something of worth and to integrate yourself into the community.
I always think of blog commenting as a way of establishing a community presence and to raise unaided brand awareness. Any subsequent link of page strength is an after-thought for me.
-
Thanks for the reply Tom, you were really helpful.
I had another question regarding the process of commenting on blogs/articles. Should I only comment on blogs/articles that are relative to my own niche or can I also comment and link from blogs/articles that are outside my niche?
-
Hi. Everything Tom said and I also wanted to add another extension to this - If you use Firefox this is for checking nofollow and dofollow links. When you add the extension, if you right click and select the nodofollow it hghlights nofollows in red and dofollows in blue. I use it all the time.
-
A dofollow link will pass the SEO strength, or "PageRank" of the page to the site that it links to. A nofollow link, in theory, will not do this. That's the main difference between the two.
By that logic, you may assume that a nofollow link will not help you rank for a keyword, but I don't think this is completely the case. Having a link to your site in any capacity may improve the "authoritativeness" of your site. SEOMoz uses Page Authority and Domain Authority to measure this and, while not an official Google metric, it stands to say that if you have 2 identical sites, one has 5 nofollow links from newspapers and the other has none, Google may well think that the site with the links has more authority or trust and may treat it more favourably. We all know how much Google loves to promote real brands.
As for seeing if a link is dofollow or nofollow, you can either inspect the element in the source code, or a convenient and hassle-free way to test is with the SEOMoz toolbar. That toolbar contains an option to highlight the links on the page - green links are dofollow and pink links are nofollow. If you check previous posts on any website, you should be able to see a pattern of whether they allow for dofollow or nofollow links - but in the end, this is at the discretion of the webmaster.
Hope this helps!
-
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?
I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.
Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont0 -
Doubleclick and NoFollow
Hi, I'm trying to work out whether a group of links to my site are Follow or NoFollow. There is no rel=noFollow on the link but they do appear to go through Doubleclick (the link begins with this http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/), will this automatically cut-off any link juice? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | whis0 -
301 with nofollow ?
Hi, our ecommerce link penalty was revoked by google back in Feb 26th 2013, but to this day we have not seen any improvement on our rankings. Due to 80% revenue loss we had to layoff quite a few people to stay alive. Situation now is more dire then ever for our company. We have millions of dollars invested in our business and google just busted it for some "low quality" or "spammy links" as they call it. We want to try to move to a different domain and do a 301 from the old domain to make sure our previous customers can still find us as a last effort to stay alive. But doing so we do not want to the bad links juice to flow to our new domain. Can we do a 301 with nofollow and will that have any negative impact or any impact at all.? any suggestion is greatly appreciated. Thank you Nick We are planning on moving to a different domain after 10 years, and laying off bunch of people due to loss of revenue.
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
How to fix broken links?
Hi, I use WordPress CMS with Yoast SEO plugin. I have just found out that my 403 errors increased dramatically. It seems that all my tags below of each post are being broken for some reason. When i click on the tags i get the following massage: **403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. ** I assume it has something to do with the configuration within Yoast SEO plugin. Dose anyone know how should i fix that? Thanks, Raviv evsGujA
Technical SEO | | Indiatravelz0 -
Is there a suggested limit to the amount of links on a sitemap?
Currently, I have an error on my moz dashboard indicating there are too many links on one of my pages. That page is the sitemap. It was my understanding all internal pages should be linked to the sitemap. Can any mozzers help clarify the best practice here? Thanks, Clayton
Technical SEO | | JorgeUmana0 -
Does Yelp pass link juice?
This is probably a profoundly obvious question, but I can't seem to find an explicit answer on the internet, so I'll ask it here: Yelp's links out to local business websites are not nofollow'd, but they go through a javascript-based redirect. My understanding is that javascript redirected links do not pass link juice, so a link from a yelp profile will not directly impact my page authority; however, it looks like yelp does use nofollow judiciously for internal links, so I don't understand why they would allow follow for these "useless" outbound links. Do yelp's javascript-redirected links pass link juice?
Technical SEO | | tvkiley0 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1 -
Secondary Menu - nofollow or other strategy?
We have a "secondary main menu" on a site that displays some popular pages of the site. They are in the main navigation of the site as subpages but we wanted to highlight them on every page of the site through this secondary menu. so this secondary menu is the same on every page of the site. So we have the main menu on the top of the site, subpages on the left and this secondary menu below the subpages (in a blue box so they stand out). Is this secondary menu confusing for the structure of the site or negative at all (in relation to robots, not UX)? Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu? thanks for replies!
Technical SEO | | Motava0