SEO - The Difference Between Do-Follow and No-Follow Links

The difference between Do-Follow and No-Follow links may not be important to the average internet browser, but to webmasters and internet marketers, they are two of the most important terms you will come across. Invented in 2005, "NoFollow" is a tag that can be added to html links to instruct search engines not to count the link towards the target site's ranking.

You see, one of the backbones to the ranking system of many search indexes is a sort of cyberspace democracy. If a website links to another site with a given anchor text, the search index sees that as a "vote" for the other website. That is, if I link to a site with the anchor text "widgets", then the search engines read that as me saying that the link I am directing people to is a good site to find information about widgets. The stronger my page is, the stronger my "vote" is.

As you can see, links play an important role in search engine rankings. Once people found this out, they started abusing it by spamming web 2.0 sites with links to their sites, in order to boost their search engine rankings. Now, many of these sites have added the "NoFollow" tag to their anchor tags. Many internet marketers do not realize this and continue to futilely build up links on these sites, never knowing that the usefulness of these links is far less than they believe it to be.

For this reason, when building your backlink structure, it is important to find places to do it that use the "DoFollow" tag.

Source: Ezine

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