What is a dofollow link?

A link is a reference from one website to another. A dofollow link allows Google to pass on trust signals from a linking website to the linked target page – they are different from nofollow links in this regard. You can find out exactly what this means in this article.

A link is a reference from one website to another. A dofollow link allows Google to pass on trust signals from a linking website to the linked target page – they are different from nofollow links in this regard. You can find out exactly what this means in this article.

A central concept of the internet is the practice of linking documents with one another. This is achieved by creating links between web pages. Google has been able to establish itself as a search engine because it has taken the approach of viewing and evaluating these links as trust signals between web pages.

Is there a special tag for a dofollow link?

As a rule, links have the dofollow attribute. Dofollow tells GoogleBot that it may crawl the recommended backlink. The bot interprets the dofollow link, also called a follow link, as a sign of trust from the linking website to the linked target page. This trust signal in turn has a positive effect on the ranking of the linked target page.

The dofollow attribute does not have to be specified separately in the HTML code. All links that are not explicitly designated as nofollow are treated as dofollow.

Over the years, however, website operators have repeatedly tried to create links through spammy means in order to gain Google’s trust. The comments sections of blogs, for example, were often misused in an attempt to gain backlinks.
Since this link spam could be easily automated, Google pulled the ripcord in 2005 and introduced the nofollow attribute for links. This meant that linking could be decoupled from the transfer of trust, if necessary. You can find out more about nofollow at Ask-SISTRIX

Steve Paine
05.02.2021