{"id":29908,"date":"2024-11-12T12:40:10","date_gmt":"2024-11-12T12:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/blog\/wiki\/dofollow-link\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T09:23:16","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T09:23:16","slug":"Dofollow_Link","status":"publish","type":"wiki","link":"https:\/\/www.seobility.net\/en\/wiki\/Dofollow_Link","title":{"rendered":"Dofollow Link"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is a dofollow link?<\/span><\/h2>\n
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\"dofollow<\/a> <\/p>\n
Figure:<\/b> Dofollow Link – Author: Seobility – License: CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A dofollow link is a hyperlink that links to another page or website and is used by search engines to help rank websites. They help search engines to understand how popular a page is, which in turn influences its ranking in search results on Google and other search engines. Every dofollow link to an external site can be considered a ‘vote’ or recommendation for that site. There are many additional factors, but ranking highly in search results is usually, at least partially, a consequence of a page being linked to from many different websites.\n<\/p>\n

HTML Code for follow and nofollow links<\/span><\/h2>\n

The structure of HTML hyperlinks is very simple. By default, only one attribute is required, the ‘href’ attribute, which describes where to send people who click on the link. An example dofollow link to Google would be as follows:\n<\/p>\n

<a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\">Google<\/a><\/pre>\n
An HTML link is considered a ‘dofollow’ link by default, so nothing extra is required. Unless there is some other mechanism used to block search engine crawl bots<\/a>, like robots.txt<\/a>, search engines will follow links that they find on web pages. A nofollow link<\/a> allows webmasters to prevent search engines like Google from taking it into consideration when crawling a page. An example nofollow link to Google would be as follows:\n<\/p>\n
<a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">Google<\/a><\/pre>\n
The introduction of nofollow<\/span><\/h2>\n
Treating links as ‘votes’ for a page may not always be desirable behavior for webmasters. Since an external link<\/a> is considered a recommendation for that site, webmasters may not wish to endorse a website while linking to it. Or, sometimes links may be there for private purposes, and the pages they link to are not intended for public consumption. In these cases, links can be marked as ‘nofollow’. Google has recommended marking certain links as nofollow since 2005.\n<\/p>\n
Adding the ‘nofollow’ rel attribute to a link may stop Google from following that link when crawling a site and it will not take that link as a ‘vote’ for the page it links to. This can be useful for a variety of reasons, as explained below.\n<\/p>\n
Note: Since March 1, 2020, Google treats nofollow only as a hint and no longer as a directive. This means using nofollow is no longer a guarantee that Google will not follow a certain link.\n<\/p>\n
\nAn example of our own follow\/nofollow ratio, which can be found in our free backlink checker tool<\/a>\n<\/p>\n
Common misconceptions about dofollow links<\/span><\/h2>\n
There are several common misconceptions about dofollow links, including:\n<\/p>\n