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Difference between nofollow and mythical dofollow - lets put this to rest

by Benguy
1 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've looked through a ton of threads here on this subject and maybe I'm a little thick-headed, but I want to make sure I have this right, for everyone's sake!

1) There is no such thing as "do follow"
2) Nofollow links do NOT pass on "link juice"
3) Nofollow links do NOT transfer anchor text
4) Nofollow links are still indexed sometimes
a) It's up to Google whether or not they index any link
5) Nofollow links can still be useful for traffic

#'s 2-4 come straight from the horse's mouth - About rel="nofollow" - Webmaster Tools Help

If nofollow links do not transfer anchor text then I dare to say that they likely have no SEO benefit due to a lack of relevance. Saying otherwise would mean you could rank with only irrelevant links. In other words, you can rank any site for any keyword and create the first entirely irrelevant search result if you have enough backlinks.

What I don't understand is all the hullabaloo about "natural" link building. It's not a damn garden, it's the internet. What exactly is "natural" link building? I've seen people say that you should make your site appear to have "natural" backlinks by balancing nofollow with ...er... "dofollow" backlinks. Here are Google's provided conditions for the use of a nofollow tag:

1) Untrusted Content
2) Paid Links
3) Crawl Prioritization (Low Priority)

So, if I have this whole "natural" link building thing straight, I'm supposed to have a bunch of links pointing to my site that qualify as untrusted content? Or how about a nice, "natural" paid link??
#difference #dofollow #mythical #nofollow #put #rest
  • Profile picture of the author mandark
    1) There is no declared piece of code which makes something "dofollow", but it is just a way of defining a blog/forum/whatever that purposefully doesn't do "nofollow".
    2-4)Yes.
    5) Yes, they can be useful for getting (usually small amounts of) traffic, just not for SEO.

    Natural backlinks just means that you want it to look like people found your site slowly, over time, and linked to it. Unnatural backlinks are like where you have a site that generates backlinks for you: if Google sees 100 new backlinks in one day, with only 1/day previously, it would consider this unnatural and penalize your search ranking for it. The point of it is that backlinks are supposed to be by other sites who actually want to link to your site because of its content.
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