Not all backlinks are created equal.

At the outset, they seem to look and function the same way– clicking sends you from one website to another.

But behind the surface, or once you inspect a link (A No follow link will have a “rel=no follow” when inspected), it can come up as either DoFollow or NoFollow.

But why does it matter?

DoFollow Backlinks

DoFollow backlinks send “link juice” to the site it is pointing to. It helps SEO-wise because there is some authority being passed on to the linked page. It can help with keyword rankings and also improve page rank. 

The better the page rank of the website, the better it is for the website it is linking to. This is because a page with a good page rank is more trusted by Google, which in turn will give much authority to the linked website. 

No Follow Backlinks

Nofollow backlinks, in essence, is just a link. It doesn’t pass on any SEO authority to the site it links to. So it doesn’t necessarily help in terms of keyword rankings and SEO. 

Why Use a NoFollow Backlink?

By default, backlinks are DoFollow. There are times though that you don’t endorse a site or a site has no real connection to your material. You want to alert the SEO gods, a.k.a. Google, that this is the case.

If you constantly DoFollow link to sites that are irrelevant, Google may eventually determine that your site is not a trustworthy source of information. This, in turn, can hurt your page ranking. 

Having a NoFollow tag can also dissuade spam comments, whose only real reason for commenting on your site is the link juice. You don’t want to be sending page rank authority to these kind of websites.

Dofollow VS NoFollow Commenting

Once before, I would constantly be on the lookout for DoFollow blogs to comment on, in hopes of getting link juice back to my website.

This was actually a bad idea.

This is because if you do find one, they will actually soon be filled with spammers that are only after the site’s link juice. There will be lots of comments pointing to dubious websites. If you are included in this pool, it may even affect your site negatively. 

Comment on Relevant Sites

Instead of checking if a site is DoFollow or NoFollow for commenting, what is important to take note is if the website or page is relevant to your site. 

If it is DoFollow then you get a relevant link juice back, if it is NoFollow then you may at least get new viewers to your website considering you leave a comment valuable enough to be clicked on. Leaving a low value comment will be next to useless. This is the way forward if you want to be noticed when commenting in this day and age. 

A Healthy Balance 

It is healthy to have a mix of DoFollow and NoFollow backlinks to your website anyway. In this way, it would appear to Google that you are building backlinks organically. 

So that’s it, I hope you learned a thing or two about the difference between DoFollow and NoFollow backlinks! Use each of them accordingly and you’ll be on your way to a healthily linked website.