Sign in Subscribe
Marketing

What Are Dofollow Backlinks and How Do They Work?

If you are wondering what dofollow links are and how they actually work for your website, you are at the right place. read more in our blog

Crispino

• 7 min read
What Are Dofollow Backlinks and How Do They Work?

If you are wondering what dofollow links are and how they actually work for your website, you are at the right place. I will walk you through the details of the dofollow links in this guide. For your easy understanding, everything is broken down into easy-to-grasp sections. You will find the true purpose of dofollow backlinks, how exactly they work for a website, their importance, and implementation. So, let’s dive right in!

The main objective of improving the SEO of a website is to meet the business’s goals. Whether it is about getting organic traffic to a website or making an effort to take a website to the top in the search ranking results.

Everything revolves around SEO. And backlinks to your website play a significant role for search engines in determining how credible your website is. With the evolution of SEO strategies and tools, AI SEO is becoming a major player in optimizing websites and understanding algorithms. SEO is an umbrella term under which you will find several other important terms such as dofollow links, nofollow links, doindex, noindex, etc. To expand your SEO knowledge, enrolling in a digital marketing course is recommended.

The concept of backlinks is to improve the organic traffic to your website. Also, it helps you earn the trust of search engines, and that ultimately gives you a better ranking in search results. SEO professionals keep this in mind while creating strategies to attract traffic.

The involvement of dofollow links in the entire link building process makes it even stronger when it comes to leaving an impression on your prospective clients. That being said, let’s now explore how you can use dofollow links for your website.

A dofollow link is a link that points back to your website. It was introduced by Google back in 2005. The primary purpose of introducing dofollow links is to reduce spam indexing and enhance search results. Dofollow basically passes the authority of a source website to a linked website. Thus, this pass of authority is considered as ‘Link Juice,’ which plays a notable role in revamping your website SEO.

Simply stated Dofollow link is a link that is available by default on the website, and it really does not require any additional element to become a dofollow link. So, if you are producing a dofollow link, there is no need to add any attributes to make it a dofollow link explicitly.

A dofollow link has HTML code that looks like this:

<a href=“https://outreachmonks.com/”>Outreach Monks</a>

Note: You don’t have to add any special attributes to the link for it to be dofollow.

It’s pretty simple to create dofollow links, and webmasters use this practice of dofollow links to reach to connect with others.

Nofollow links, on the other hand, are different from dofollow links. It is an HTML attribute value that is used to notify search engine bots that the target link ranking should not be affected by a hyperlink. This link contains a rel=”nofollow” attribute in its HTML code. A nofollow link intends to tell search engines to ignore the link.

The main idea of nofollow links is to reduce spam. For instance, imagine how difficult it would be for Twitter or Facebook to handle millions of spam links on their platform had there been no concept of nofollow attribute to manage spammers. People would have used such platforms to gain links for their own websites simply by creating spam accounts.

The use of the nofollow link is to reduce the number of spammy comments and lower the spam social media signups.

A nofollow link has HTML code that looks like the one shown below:

<a href=“https://outreachmonks.com/” rel=“nofollow”>Outreach Monks </a>

For nofollow links, make sure a rel=“nofollow” attribute is added to the link. This will help search engines to identify that this link isn’t helping or hurting SEO.

If we weigh dofollow and nofollow links on the technical ground, the only difference you would find is the presence of a nofollow tag with a nofollow link.

If you ask any normal user to make a difference between these two types of links, they probably could not spot the difference. Both the links appear just normal.

Nonetheless, the practical difference that makes these two links apart from each other is that the nofollow links do not pass the link equity that is link juice. You can understand it in a way that if you get a nofollow backlink to your website, the linking web page won’t pass the authority to your page. Thus, it is not going to improve the ranking by any means. Yes, you can say it simply goes worthless in terms of SEO.

High-quality backlinks bring a bunch of benefits along. That’s the reason why SEO experts want to earn strong backlinks that are authentic for all websites. In fact, the SEO is affected by the dofollows links only. Nofollow links have no impact on your website SEO. So, they are not used for websites. The priority is given to dofollow links to build connections with other websites in your niche.

Here are many benefits of Dofollow Links:

  • Dofollow links enhance page rank
  • They help improve website authority
  • The content may rank higher for several keywords
  • Higher page rank attracts advertisers
  • Dofollow links are higher in demand
  • You may get diverse referring domains

At the very basic level, you will notice that there are no dofollow links as such. In order to make a link a dofollow link, you really don’t have to do anything extra. Or you don’t require any special attribute to make a dofollow link. They are just the default links that you will find anywhere on a website. For instance, if there is a link available on your one web page linking to another web page on the same website. It is a sheer example of a dofollow link.

Similarly, if a link on a source website tells search engines to share the source website’s authority with the destination website. Dofollow links work as a vote of trust for a website. It assures that you recommend a website you are pointing to. Thus, it may help increase the website ranking as well.



Well, there is no specific number of days that you can point out. But generally, Google takes three to four days to recognize dofollow links. However, the search engine spiders crawl a significant volume of web pages in one single day. So the chances of experiencing dofollow links get higher.

Websites with low traffic and having backlinks from similar scale websites makes it difficult to rank better in search results. On the other end of the spectrum, you will find that websites with better and high-quality backlinks will get recognized quite quickly.

Nofollow links are not bad at all. Instead, they can help generate traffic to your website. For instance, if you are getting nofollow links from multiple websites, it will automatically boost your backlink portfolio. It is true that Dofollow links are highly beneficial, but it won’t be entirely correct to say that nofollow links are of no use. Or you should scrap them. No! You should not.

An organic backlink profile is one that consists of both dofollow as well as nofollow links. So, do not avoid nofollow links. It’s not going to harm your SEO. It has zero impact on SEO. In fact, take it as a part of the link-building process. Make sure you are making the most of it to amplify your website position in the search rank results.

What is the Difference Between Nofollow and Noindex?

Nofollow links are used within the HTML code to suggest search engines not to pass link equity through any links. At the same time, the noindex directive is added to the HTML source code of a web page to suggest search engines not include that specific page in the search results.

By default, every web page is set to ‘index.’ You need to add a

<meta name="software" content="noindex" /> directive to a webpage in the <head> section of the HTML.

This way, you are telling search engines not to crawl a said page and not include it in the SERPs.

It makes sense to check if the website if having dofollow links or not. Rather you spend plenty of time on other things, it is advisable to check yourself if a website does have dofollow links or not.

To do that, you can thoroughly view the source code of a website, or you may also do it using the ‘Inspect’ feature. Be double sure that a website does not have rel=nofollow in the link code.

Besides, it is important to check these backlinks with the help of a backlink API to analyze their efficiency. If you do not know anything about SEO or want to empower your website SEO, you can reach out to Outreach Monks for professional help.

Happy Dofollow Backlinking!

So, learning about dofollow links and nofollow links will surely help you prepare better SEO strategies to bring your site to a better position. Getting authoritative backlinks for your website is a great way to divert traffic to your website. Moreover, it indicates to search engines that the website has something credible to display. Undoubtedly, it will add huge value to your website if you have a good website design and several high authority websites linking to your website.

Furthermore, if you are looking for an efficient way to acquire dofollow backlinks, you can consider agencies like Linkbuilder.io. They are good at what they do, maybe a bit costly though. You can check out linkbuilder.io review to understand better.

Your only focus should be on getting dofollow backlinks. This will generate a sense of trust and help attract search engine traffic to your website. The benefits of dofollow are many, and you can reap them effortlessly. All you have to do is pay attention to the possible opportunity. So, now, it’s your turn to share the experience of your dofollow link building with me. If you have any queries, leave a message in the comments box below. I will get back to you at the earliest.

Author’s Bio

Simran Sahni is an Operations Team Lead at OutreachMonks. She excels in marketing, business, and technology niches. Besides her expertise in digital marketing, she has a flair for writing.