What is dofollow?

What is dofollow anyway?

Well, there’s no such thing as dofollow! it’s actually NOT nofollow.

ok, so what is nofollow then?

nofollow is the term used to describe links that you see on webpages that have a special attribute applied to them so that when Google and other search engines see them, they don’t pass any of the authority of the site they appear on to the site they link to. See? easy huh?

dofollow 101

Example…

Lets say that your site is the number 1 site on Google for ‘hairy dogs‘. Whenever anyone searches for something to do with hairy dogs you can be sure that they will find your site at the top of all the search engine pages because your site has a very high authority and receives a truck load of traffic and interactions each day.

Now let’s say that you put a link on your site to another site about ‘skinny dogs‘ and you use those exact words. Because your site has ‘juice’ (the common term of high authority in Googles eyes) then the site that you’re linking to will gain some of that juice in relation to those keywords just because you linked to it.

You see, Google is a machine. It doesn’t actually ‘know’ anything, it can only analyse traffic, links, users per page etc. so one way it determines if a site is about ‘skinny dogs’ when someone searches for those terms is by checking which sites are using those words to link to other sites and then ordering the linked sites according to how much authority the sites that link to them have.

The more authority the site has that is using those words to link to another, the more likely it is to use the linked site in the results page when someone searches with those words.

This is where nofollow comes in, by adding rel=”nofollow” to the link, google wont apply any of the ‘juice’ from your page to the page you’re linking to and it’ll treat that link just like any other link on your page. By NOT adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link means that some of your ‘juice’ will leak to the site you’re linking to.

So, dofollow is just a way of saying that your links pass on a little bit of your sites ‘juice’ to the sites that you link to.

I hope that makes things clear!

Download nofollow control CommentLuv

It is a good idea to update your CommentLuv plugin to v2.818 so you can take control of the links that are appended to the comment. You can update it in the dashboard by using the automatic update in wordpress or you can visit the download page and update it manually here.