Why should you find dofollow links?

We’ve discussed the importance of links in our post How Do I Get Links to My Site? but did you know that the majority of links you leave around the Internet will be nofollow? In other words, they’ll count for nothing when it comes to improving your search engine position in Google. If you want to discover more about search engine optimisation, check out our SEO Course and Social Media Training.

Whether it is submitting to a directory, buying links, reciprocal links or commenting on a blog it is useful to know whether a link to your website will be nofollow or not.

Read on to learn how you can spot nofollow links, and our list of “dofollow” websites and blogs that will help you move your way up through Google.

What is a backlink?

Backlinks- or inbound links – are literally incoming links to a web-page. Their original use was as a means of Internet navigation, but nowadays (when everything goes through the search engines) they primarily have an SEO function. In other words, search engines such as Google will consider links to a page as reflective of its importance or popularity, and rank it higher accordingly.

What is a nofollow link?

nofollow is used in HTML to instruct search engines that a link shouldn’t influence the target page’s ranking; the search engine does not follow the link or use it to gauge the importance of the target web page. Confused? We offer HTML Training if you need to learn the HTML basics.

Most blogs and websites are “nofollow sites”; the intention is to hinder search engine spammers (or spamdexing) and to ensure the quality of search engine results. I.e. without nofollow links, it would be too attractive to those who copy and paste links and embed them in comments on others’ blogs to move a website to Google’s SERP #1.

Here’s a video from Matt Cutts explaining how Google treats nofollows:

How do you know if you’re posting on a nofollow website? The link you post will look exactly the same if it’s nofollow. So you need to check for something like this in the HTML of existing comments and links:

<a href=”http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/” rel=”nofollow”>My website</a>

This will look like this – My website

To reveal the HTML on Firefox select the link, right click and choose “View Selection Source” – this will bring up a text file of the HTML.

In contrast, an ordinary link – which will allow a backlink (and the subsequent search engine indexing) – will look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/“>My website</a>

Exactly as above, this will look like this – My website

It is worth noting (see below comment from Software Reviews “just because a link is nofollow doesn’t mean it has no value.” This is true, whilst not follow links will not provide you with Google ‘link juice’ they’re  a useful source of site traffic, and brand exposure.

What is a dofollow link?

As we’ve seen, putting “nofollow” in the HTML for links will tell major search engines like Google that you don’t want the link counted when they’re crawling the web and indexing information. Why would you do this on your own website? Well, you may want to avoid being linked to a questionable site for example in our Black Hat v White Hat article we have made all links to the Black Hat sites nofollow. Some SEOs claim that ‘Page Sculpting’ (making your links to your less important pages nofollow, and using links from high page rank pages to increase rankings of lower page rank pages) is dead. It is difficult to find proof that it works and is very time consuming.

If you’ve done any reading around SEO you may have come across the term “dofollow”. The term applies to any link without the nofollow tag (you do not need to add code to make a link dofollow). Dofollow links do count towards search engine results. Most blogs now use nofollow as standard, but it’s personal preference what you choose for your website.

Choosing whether your comments are set to follow or nofollow is usually controllable within the admin area of your blog. We use WordPress; if you need to learn how to set up a WordPress blog we offer beginners WordPress Training, and if you need to know how to integrate a WordPress blog into your existing site we also offer a Creating Custom WordPress Themes Training Course

So how can you get dofollow links?

Now of course we’re not advocating finding as many websites as possible that allow dofollow links and spamming your website across the Internet. Far from it, at Silicon Beach Training we get far too many comments such as “Wow this is a great blog. I have bookmarked you” – these comments are purely an attempt to get a backlink (although they will be nofollow) and if they have nothing relevant to say then we delete them sharpish!

However, regular and relevant comments on other people’s dofollow blogs is a really good way to improve page ranking, and comments containing links that are nofollow may still drive traffic to your site. So:

• Comment on a blog if you know the writer
• You wish to establish a relationship with the writer for social networking purposes
• If you have linked to their blog in your own post and are letting them know
• If you find the topic they are discussing interesting

Basically, it’s essential that you have actually read the article you are commenting on and have something interesting to say!

Where can I get dofollow links?

There is software that can find dofollow links although we haven’t used it at Silicon Beach Training (let us know your experiences if you have). Alternatively, there are also search engines that will find dofollow blogs. Another useful tool is Bing’s “linkfromdomains” feature- just type in this command followed by a website to discover all the sites linked to from that domain – this fairly new addition to the SEO’s toolbox is an excellent way to find out which kind of websites an influential domain is likely to link to (more information on this link-building tip).

I’ve hunted down a few examples of blogs that are dofollow – although don’t spam them, or they may not be dofollow for much longer! Also remember that most comments are moderated before they appear anyway – so a spammy comment will rarely see the light of day.

List of dofollow blogs:

• Find .edu dofollow blogs here

• Check out this blog for an excellent example of dofollow abuse and useless spammy comments.

• Adobe.com – as far as I can see, all Adobe forums allow dofollow links.

• http://www.affiliateprofitcenter.com/

• http://www.chutneytech.com/

• http://www.fabfreelancewriting.com/blog/

• http://www.yackyack.co.uk/ – the blog for a London based SEO consultant.

• For more see this dofollow blog list…

Another way is to use social networks, indexing and reciprocal links, to create backlinks and build your brand across the internet. Some examples:

• Create a blog – see our WordPress Training course to learn more about this.

• Sign up to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – we can help if you’re new to social networks with our Social Media Training.

• Add your website to dofollow bookmarking website such as Propeller or Technorati.

• This is an obvious one, but make sure you add your website to the Google directory.

• It’s well worth finding a reason to add a link to Wikipedia, even though it will be nofollow.

• Similarly, if you can think of a good idea then create a Facebook app and create a YouTube channel.

• If, like Silicon Beach Training’s Heather, you can take a good photo then use Flickr to build links and traffic and maybe get your photos showing up on other sites. You can try sneakily editing Flickr’s automatic nofollow for links in comments by using this HTML – <a rel=”follow” href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>text</a>  – Flickr will then add a nofollow but only after the HREF, meaning the “follow” will have already been passed! Not sure if this still works please comment below if you know more than we do. Thanks to this handy blog on getting links from top domains for this tip – check it out for examples of getting links from the top 50 domains.

Of course the Black Hat versus White Hat debate will never be settled, but my advice is to remember to add value whatever kind of link-building you do. This means not spamming but thinking about what will appeal to and be of use to your clientele/ potential clientele.

Please do comment if you’ve got some other link-building tricks up your sleeve or have found a really effective way of finding dofollow websites.

Similar posts you may like

1. Wondering where to find dofollow blogs? Look no further!
2. What’s the latest on nofollow links?
3. SEO Implications Of NoFollow Links: A Nuanced Approach Is Best
4. How Do I Get Links to My Site? Use Your Social Media Linkerati – A 3 Step Guide
5. Optimise your Facebook Fanpage for Google

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backlinks, course, dofollow, dofollow blog, google, how can i get dofollow links, HTML, inbound links, link building, nofollow, Search Engine Optimisation, search engines, SEO, seo course, seo training, training, what is dofollow, what is nofollow

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