To Follow Or Not To Follow That Is The Question

Being a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist, there is one question I get asked a lot by new bloggers.

What is a dofollow link?

This is a good question because there is no way to specify dofollow in a hyperlink. The attribute you can set in a hyperlink is the opposite to dofollow, rel=”nofollow”. When a search engine comes accross a link with the rel=”nofollow” attribute it won’t follow the link and the target website will not benefit from this link from an SEO perspective. For a blog, this is a vary bad thing, it means anyone who leaves a comment or can get a link from your blog roll they will not get any ‘credit’ for getting their link onto your blog. Therefore, why bother getting a link on your blog in the first place? Although comments are suppose to be constructive and contribute to the article its still nice to reward your commenters with a link back to their site.

Whats best, normal links or nofollow links?

If a blog has nofollow enabled on it then I will not bother commenting. There isn’t any point for me to take the time to comment apart from contributing to the conversation. This sounds a bit shallow but at the end of the day, if I spend the time to comment then there has to be something in it for me and I can find other blogs out there with dofollow links where I also get rewarded for leaving a comment. So how do you specify your link to be a dofollow link? The answer is you dont, if the link doesn’t have the rel=”nofollow” attribute then it’s automatically a “dofollow” link and you will be credited for your comment. I always have dofollow links on my blog or website and I expect others to have the same.

A note of warning: Just because a link doesn’t have the nofollow attribute it doesn’t necessarily mean the link is a dofollow link. The nofollow attribute can also be specified in the head tag. If its specified here then all links on the webpage are “nofollow”.