What’s the difference?
A dofollow link looks like this in HTML:
<a href=”https://dofollow.co.uk”>Dofollow</a>
which in turn makes it appear as a text-link like this: Dofollow
A nofollow link looks like this in HTML:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”https://dofollow.co.uk”>nofollow</a>
The end result is the same. In both cases a text-link is generated. The former is created with trust by default to the external website, the later is created with no trust in the external website.
Throughout the early 2000s, search engines were having problems with keeping their search engine results showing only high-quality websites.
This in part was due to website owners trying to get their own website to the top positions of search engines to bring in more traffic to their websites.
In 2005 the largest major search engine companies Google, Yahoo and Microsoft came together to create the rel=”nofollow” tag to make it so webmasters had an option to still link out to other websites but without passing any signals for search engines.
Was it needed? At the time it certainly was, but now I believe it is doing more harm than good.
The majority of websites today are using content management systems such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla which means a lot more links are being made nofollow as default. This makes it harder for new businesses and websites to do well in search overall as obtaining high-quality links is very important to show up well in the organic search results.
Overall more website owners need to be made aware that linking out to external websites that you trust isn’t a bad thing, and if anything it’s a really good thing which helps keep PageRank flowing between both small and medium websites.
We think that a wise decision search engines could make is that links from trusted websites pass PageRank regardless of whether they are nofollowed. This would help smaller website owners compete with the bigger companies within their industry.
Do you have any thoughts on this? We would be interested in hearing from you.