As I have mentioned before, not all links are created equal. There is a difference between DoFollow and NoFollow backlinks.
DoFollow VS NoFollow backlinks in a nutshell
A DoFollow link passes on “link juice”, passing on some authority to the linked website, while a NoFollow link does not. The link juice can help in terms of keyword ranking and SEO.
Links on Blog Commenting
If you are blog commenting, you might be interested to know if a blog allows for DoFollow backlinks for comments or if it is a NoFollow blog, seeing as DoFollow backlinks pass on some SEO authority, albeit even just a little bit.
In most cases though, you would find that high authority websites would have the NoFollow attribute for their comments. This is because they don’t want to risk linking to a bad site and be penalized by Google in the process.
In any case, it is essentially not good practice to comment on a site simply because it is DoFollow. You will find that these websites could be riddled with spammers with bad pages, and commenting with them might even hurt your SEO efforts.
What is most important to take note is if the site is relevant to your own content and that you leave a meaningful comment. That way, people might find your post interesting and click on the link to your website.
Handy to Know
For an SEO enthusiast such as myself, it is pretty interesting to know and take note if links have a NoFollow tag in them, whether they be anywhere on the website, a post, or the comments section.
How to know if it is a DoFollow or NoFollow backlink?
One thing you can do is to literally just inspect a link. If it has the “rel=no follow” attribute, then it is a NoFollow backlink.
If you can’t be bothered to keep inspecting the link, there is an easier way to see through all the links at once since they will be color coded in your screen.
What I personally use for this is the MozBar.
The first thing you do is download the MozBar extension. I use this with Chrome.
Once you have installed the extension, you will find a toolbar at the top of each website page.
What you do is click on the pencil icon on the upper left side. Then a drop down will appear.
If you click on “Followed”, Do Follow links will appear in blue. If you click on “No-Followed”, NoFollow links will appear in red.
Now you are able to tell right away if a link is DoFollow or NoFollow. I will personally use this to observe website practices and see how they actually treat their backlinks. Use this knowledge how you will, an best of luck to your link building efforts!