Dofollow or Nofollow: Blogging Tips

I have seen the question get asked a lot regarding follow and no follow links, what are they and which should I use. Hopefully I can shed some light onto this.

First I want to begin by saying that at the end of the day your blog is owned and run by you. It is therefore your choice and your decision to use whichever link you feel most comfortable with. There is guidance and consequences but like most things in life it is up to you if you want to run the risk or not. Before we start some people refer to Follow links as DoFollow they are the same thing just with a different name.

Right, so let’s begin.

If we begin by thinking of Google as a popularity contest. The more popular your business/brand/blog is the higher up in Google search rankings it will be. Let’s face it we all want to be popular and we all want to be on Page 1 of google search results. Well how many of us when we use a search on google go past page 1? In order for a business/brand/blog to be popular people need to talk about it. There are almost 200 ways you can become popular in the eyes of google, but one of the most important is the backlink.

Backlink

A backlink is a link to something. So UK-Bloggers may have a link on their site which links to AO.com. This link to AO.com is refered to as a back link. A link from your website pointing to another website is called a backlink. [or it links back to another site]. This is where no follow and follow come into play, as some backlinks increase you up the popularity rankings more than others. Both follow and no follow WILL improve your popularity on google, as let’s face it you are still being ‘talked’ about but a follow link carries more weighting [a bit like shouting really loudly that this site is fantastic and no-follow is a bit like whispering to the person next to you that you kinda think its ok].

Now most companies want a follow link, why? well because they want you to shout about their product not whisper about it and it moves them more places up the popularity ranking. In other words they appear higher up on the search rankings.

So why is a follow link a bad thing?

It isn’t a bad thing and that leads me back to my first point, your blog your rules. However what is a dishonest thing is companies paying for follow links. Think logically I could pay 100 people £100 each to shout at the tops of their voices and tell everyone they meet how fantastic my product is. My product would grow in popularity but is it necessarily the best product out there? I have in a way created my own popularity by paying for it. It isn’t natural popularity, it is not a true reflection of the market place and I have won the popularity race because I had more money than my competitors. As a consumer I want to know that those appearing higher on the search engine rankings, like google, are there because they are the best and have got there naturally. This is why Google do not like PAID follow links. They alter the rankings of which business appear on google search results and are not a true and natural reflection of the market place. Google can and will penalise both the company who paid for the link and the site the paid link was upon. The interflora case is a perfect example of this.

You might be thinking, well it is only me I cannot make that much of a difference. The fact is you can because of how important a backlink is to the companies rankings and how do you know it is just you?They maybe paying hundreds if not thousands to do the same.

So should I just put all my links as no follow then?

Putting every link on your site as no follow makes your site look unnatural. As a blog you are wanting to talk about things and share your experiences and to have everything as no follow looks simply unnatural in the eyes of the search engines. As a person you would not whisper everything, some things you would naturally want to shout about and recommend and the same should be true for your blog. These things you would naturally shout about should be follow links.

So when should I use No follow and follow then?

DoFollow

Refer to site having related content.
High quality websites (like Google blog)
Anything you would naturally write about that you haven’t received payment or a product for.

NoFollow

In comments section as we do not have any control over it (any spam website might write a comment which might affect your website)
Unrelated sites in content.
Casino, gambling, porn sites.
Affiliate Links
Any site you would not naturally want to endorse.

Why do some people get more requests than others?

This goes back to the popularity contest thing. If I randomly selected 100 people to shout about my brand they may all be normal people like me who have very little influence over other people. My influence will only pass to a limited number of people and not be of much use. I could however select 100 celebrities and influential people like Obama. If Obama stood up and said this brand was amazing most people in the world would believe him and want to buy said product. So the more influence you have the more you can affect the popularity of that brand.

Influence in blogging terms is measured on a number of factors including but not limited to Followers on social media, Domain authority [DA], Moz rank, Google Page Rank [PR] and page views.

Companies want their links on the most influential sources they can find, so the better your stats are the more desirable to a company you become. This in SEO terms is called passing link juice. You are passing your influence [juice] to the company you have linked to and the more influential the more results so the higher up the ranking the company will move.

Google can, and have done in the past, stripped bloggers of their page rank for using paid follow links. This is one of the penalties that can occur.

What about other search engines?

Google is the main search engine. As a company they hold a huge amount of power, remember they also own Youtube. Youtube and google vary on a daily basis as to who comes out as the number 1 search engine. With some even using Youtube as their prefered search engine. Therefore it pays to keep Google on side, but they are not the only ones out there.

The search engine ‘Ask’ for example treats both no follow and follow the same, to them a link is a link and have equal weighting. Yahoo will treat a no follow link almost as a follow link but will not pass on the influence/juice.

So how do I make a link follow or no follow?

All links by default are follow links. It is assumed if you are linking to something it is becuase you like it and want others to know about it. To change to a no-follow can vary between blogger or wordpress but there is a standard way to change the HTML code. [It is easy don’t worry]

Find this line of code

<a href=https://uk-bloggers.co.uk> UK Bloggers </a>

Your link won’t be the UK bloggers link but you are looking for the <a href= tag. [If you are interested this means Hypertext reference simply put a link, so in English it says use this link after the = sign for the specified text, in this case UK bloggers. So the Text UK bloggers becomes the link I gave after a href=]

To make this no follow [remember by default it is follow] we simply add rel=”no follow”. This means the relationship [rel] of this link is no follow.

<a href=https://uk-bloggers.co.uk rel=”nofollow”> UK Bloggers </a>

This link is now a no follow link.

Should you have any questions on this or other SEO or HTML queries let me know either tweet or email me. Will do my best to answer.