What Is the Dofollow Link and Its Role in SEO?
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With the ever-increasing use of the internet to guide marketing and branding initiatives for businesses, it’s important to continue expanding your knowledge of optimization tactics. One of the many common trends in SEO is using links to expand one’s audience and online presence.
By learning more about link attributes and their roles in search engine optimization, you can develop a strategic method for building the credibility of your website. To do so, you first need to understand how to differentiate between dofollow and nofollow links and determine the proper ways to use them to your advantage.
A dofollow link is seen as the default link for articles, webpages, or other forms of web content in HTML coding. Websites typically include dofollow links via anchor text to other websites or content pages. Search engine bots or crawlers scan over dofollow links to pinpoint relationships between websites. As dofollow links are considered to be default links, they are displayed as follows:
Websites use dofollow links to enhance their ranking in search engine results pages. They do this by connecting with other website owners and exchanging links to content and or webpages. When a high-ranking website links to a lesser-known website, search bots will elevate the lesser-known website’s status in search results or page rank. The ultimate goal of having dofollow links to your website is to receive increased web traffic and business engagement.
Here are some specific examples of why website owners use dofollow links:
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The event that sparked the introduction of the dofollow link took place in 2005 when Google created the nofollow link attribute. A nofollow link displayed the credibility of a link to search bots as the primary source of a website, meaning that search bots wouldn’t follow a link with a nofollow attribute. Further, this meant that all links to websites that had the nofollow link wouldn’t receive heightened rankings in search results pages as they did before.
This realization caused SEO experts to come up with the dofollow attribute. This attribute could take the place of a nofollow attribute in HTML links when a website owner wanted to receive credibility through their content or link sharing with another website.
When determining the best practices for enhancing your website’s SEO strategies, it can be a challenge knowing when to use dofollow links, nofollow links, or both to enhance your website. Many SEO experts have weighed in how best to use nofollow, dofollow, and other forms of linking to drive SEO tactics. Here is what the experts recommend:
Dofollow links are just one of many code attributes you can add to your site to optimize its content and linking and to bring in the most traffic and provide the best content you can. Learning how to effectively use these tools can help you elevate your SEO strategy to the next level.
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