Hi. I'm a bit confused as to what dofollow and nofollow means. I think it's something to do with the external links you have on your site, but I'm not sure. Could anyone clarify the differences? Thanks!
With Google's algorithm having at it's core the idea that a link from one site to another is a 'vote' for that site, it's a system ripe for exploitation, and google have a continual battle to regain control of it. The nofollow attribute was introduced a few years ago, in order to give webmasters the ability to let the google crawler know that they do not want such links to be considered as these 'votes', so they should not carry full value in terms of passing PageRank. It's useful as a way of discouraging spam and spam commenting, as it takes away the motive to drop links in blogs etc, purely to increase PR. dofollow isn't as an attribute as such, it's merely the opposite of nofollow
Dofollow mean that the PR juice will be pass to your site if your site url is listed at the site. Nofollow mean that the PR juice will not be pass to your site And you can hardly find any site that have Do follow rules
So, why don't people have Dofollow? To stop people spamming to get their PR higher? Thanks for the replies so far, guys, rep given
Nofollow means that it won't help your site to get some visitors to your site. Dofollow is the opposite.
Yup, external links don't usually effect a site's ranking too much, but links to bad neighborhoods in comments can hurt a small blog site pretty bad. I think Google was also annoyed back in 2005 when they came up with this because those blogs kept ranking at the top of everything and implementing nofollow across Blogspot and Wordpress by default took a lot of PR out of bloggers who relied on blog comments and trackbacks. With nofollow, blog and forum admins don't really have to moderate any comments (for SE purposes), but I think moderation is important anyway. I just use dofollow because if a link isn't worth the SE following it, it isn't worth putting on my site. And vice versa..
If you are using blogspot or wordpress, all of your links are nofollow by default. There are plugins you can download to make them followed links.
NOFollow nofollow is a HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. The nofollow attribute value is not meant for blocking access to content or preventing content to be indexed by search engines. The proper methods for blocking search engine spiders to access content on a website or for preventing them to include the content of a page in their index are the Robots Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) for blocking access and on page Meta Elements that are designed to specify on an individual page level, what search engine spider should or should not do with the content of the crawled page. DOFollow dofollow is a HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to increase the effectiveness of certain types of search engine.