The Importantance of Building DoFollow Links To Your Site
Some time ago Google gave website owners the ability to designate links on their website as DoFollow or NoFollow. DoFollow links tell Google and other search engines that they should follow the direction of the link and index the relationship between both websites for consideration in rankings. NoFollow links tell Google to ignore the link completely therefore not rewarding the linked-to website with a boost in ranking.
The designation of DoFollow and NoFollow links provides website owners with the ability to link to other websites freely without the worry of passing away too much ranking authority. NoFollow links have also helped to combat spamming techniques when it comes to blog commenting. (We are all familiar with the old school SEO strategy of leaving a blog comment for the mere opportunity to link back to your website rather than for genuine interest of conversation.) The majority of website owners now enable a NoFollow html relevance tag for the purpose of deterring BS blog comments.
So the question for SEO’s becomes, “How do I know which blogs, social bookmarking sites, article submissions sites, and other websites use DoFollow links- so that Google will reward my efforts for building a link back to my site?“
A FireFox Plugin that Distinguishes DoFollow from NoFollow Links
There are a few different ways to determine whether a website grants DoFollow or NoFollow links.
1). Ask the website owner
2). Search through the website code for relevance tags
3). Use a Firefox plugin/ applications
For starters you can always ask the website owner if they grant DoFollow or NoFollow links. Sometimes the website admin doesn’t always know the answer to this, is unreachable for questioning, or doesn’t provide you a truthful answer. So then there is option two. You can visit a website and then search the site for the relevance HTMl tag that designates whether a link is DoFollow or NoFollow. An example of what a line of code might look like for a NoFollow link would be:
<a href=”http://www.bostonwaterdamagesupport.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Boston Water damage</a>
Where as a similar DoFollow link would not have the relevance tag = nofollow and would look like.
<a href= “http://www.bostonwaterdamagesupport.com/”>Water damage Boston</a>
The problem with looking through code is that you are literally looking at code which not many people like to do and which is also time consuming not to mention also hurts your eyes. This brings us to option three. Use a Firefox plugin which highlights DoFollow links in purple font and NoFollow links in pink font. Using this Firefox plugin you can visit any site and quickly determine which type of links it uses and whether it is worth your time as an SEO to go ahead and build a link back to your target site.
Download the plugin here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nodofollow/ but not before you leave us a comment down below.
What do you think of the plugin? Will it become a part of your SEO toolbox?