Running a company website or blog entails a ton of work – especially if you count what goes into the promotion and optimization of your website. The content strategy of your website plays a pivotal role in determining your blog’s search engine ranking, and several intricacies contribute to your blog’s ranking increasing on Google.
One of the most important of such intricacies is backlinks. Backlinks are essentially links from referrer websites that contribute to the referent web resource and allow them to benefit from their domain authority.
If you run a website and want to achieve high traffic that is relevant to your service offering, and simultaneously outranks your competitors, you need to know all you can about how to get dofollow backlinks. You also need to know all you can about nofollow backlinks, and the difference between both to ensure that you use them correctly and protect your website from Google’s dreaded penalty. Keep reading to find a comprehensive guide to dofollow and nofollow links:
What are Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks?
Dofollow backlinks are essentially those links that contribute to your SEO ranking. The opposite of dofollow links is nofollow links that aren’t created to contribute toward search engine optimization and were conceptualized to stop individuals from spamming the comment section of blogs to get links.
What is the purpose of Dofollow backlinks?
The main purpose of a dofollow backlink is to pass the domain authority of the origin website to the destination website. This passage of authority helps the destination website increase its domain authority by in a way extracting “link juice” from the origin website.
This helps increase the website’s domain rating according to Google and also helps improve its keyword ranking. All links are dofollow links by default.
What is the purpose of Nofollow backlinks?
You must be wondering that if not for SEO, what is the purpose of nofollow backlinks? Think of it this way: imagine that you own a popular social media website similar to Twitter where people can sign up for free and create their accounts.
They could then link to their website and your website would be filled with spammers creating an account only to link to their website for SEO. Nofollow backlinks reduce such instances of spamming and the same goes for people who spam the comment section of popular blogs.
How do you differentiate between Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks?
To differentiate between dofollow and nofollow links, you simply have to inspect the given link in a web browser and check its HTML code. To check its HTML code, you are required to choose “Inspect” on your browser and the associated HTML code will simply pop up.
If you see the term rel=”nofollow”, then the given link is a nofollow link and if you do not see the given term, then the link is a dofollow link. You can also use a backlink analysis tool such as Moz to check whether a link is dofollow or nofollow.
Four ways you can get Dofollow backlinks
Your website can get dofollow backlinks in several ways and given below are four of the most popular methods of getting backlinks:
1. Guest posting
Guest posting is the act of writing and posting a blog on another website, and including a dofollow backlink in either the content of the article you write or in your author bio.
This is one of the most popular and successful methods of gaining dofollow links. To do so, you must first of all look for high-quality sites that post content relevant to your niche. You should then do research on their terms and conditions as well as their guest posting guidelines. Once you have written on a topic that is relevant and unique, email the blog owner and submit your work.
2. Get interviewed or written about
Another popular method of gaining dofollow backlinks is by getting your PR team to work and getting interviewed or written about on online news websites and research blogs. If your company has a CEO with an interesting story or background, an interview into their life can be published on a reputable website.
To secure such interviews and articles, you have to build rapport with the writers in your niche, and introduce yourself and your company through email. You could also give them pointers as to why their readers would be interested in reading about you and your company, and why interviewing you would benefit them.
3. Email outreach
Email outreach entails creating great pieces of content and emailing them to a list of relevant influencers. This process is similar to guest blogging, and to understand which influencers to include in your email outreach list, look for those who are relevant to your particular niche.
You should then focus on finding the top-ranking blogs in your particular niche either through Google or through a website directory. You can also go through the comments of your chosen influencers and include commenting individuals in your list too.
4. List on directories
Website directories are essentially websites that contains lists or catalogs of other websites. They can be arranged according to a category, alphabetically, or popularity. They contain a brief description, URL, and contact information for all listed websites.
To promote your blog, you should look for reputed website directories that individuals use when they are looking for a website in a particular niche. This is probably the easiest way of getting dofollow backlinks as website directories as happy to receive new entries and even allow you to add entries yourself.
When should you use Nofollow backlinks?
Nofollow backlinks are typically used by websites that do not want to either pass on their website authority or endorse the linked website. In addition to this, you could use nofollow backlinks for affiliate links, content generated by users, and sponsored links. While nofollow links do not help you get the benefits of search engine optimization, they still can help generate referral traffic to your website.
Conclusion
To sum all of this up, both dofollow and nofollow backlinks are ways how we can identify a link and let Google know how to associate the website that is linking to your website. While dofollow backlinks help you pass on authority to your website, nofollow backlinks simply do not pass any link juice either way.
