Follow Vs. No Follow Links

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Follow and no follow links are just one of the segments of SEO. Out there is huge hype about it, because people don’t know what it’s all about. It has huge importance in the digital world, so if you have any obscurities, we will make it clearer.

Follow Links

If there are still some vagueness about what follow links are, we can tell you that it’s simply the link that Google reads and it improves your SEO. So, every link on your site from some other site boosts your SEO. Therefore, more links from other sites on your site the better your SEO gets.

When Google reads the site, it counts how many inbound links there are. The more linking on a certain page, Google considers it as a popular page and instantly gets better ranking. As well, ranking in search engines will be better because Google wants to provide only the very best pages.

To make it easier for Google, they created the PageRank metric to count link points. In SEO, it’s popular to refer to link points as a “link juice”. Link juice is a tool the goes through the site and opens links on the site. The more reputable site it is, the more boost of link juice site gets. So, if you get a link from Forbes or some other big site, you can be happy, very happy.

Finally, we can define the term of following links. Those are links that count as points that boost link juice. Furthermore, it boosts the ranking of the page that link guides you to. For the reason that your position in search engines will be better.

No-Follow Links

No-follow links are links that don’t bring any points for link points. Those links don’t improve PageRank and they don’t effect on SERP (search engine result page). Defining no follow attributes is simply in HTML. Tag in HTML looks like this:

<a href=https://www.something.com/ rel=”nofollow”>Link</a>

This tag helps the search engines because it just says, “don’t count this link”.

You can think that this is mean and harmful, but there’s a reason why people use them.

Usage of No Follow Links

As we already told, the more follow links, the better ranking of the website is. PageRank measures the reputation of the site and depending on the reputation boost the site on the link. So, before links were used for scams and there was too much spamming.

People spammed everywhere just to get links, even on the blogs were too many comments just to be noticed and hopefully to get a link.

Wikipedia was also a mess.

People put their links as references with the intention of boosting link juice. Spammers were everywhere, so Google invented the “nofollow” attribute in HTML tags.

We can say that the no-follow attribute is necessary for SEO. It has done lots of good things and it’s just hard to function without it. Most of the SEO spammers disappeared, while some are still here, but it shouldn’t concern you because they won’t get a follow link. 

For example, WordPress automatically assigns every link as no-follow for all user-submitted links. Wikipedia does the same for the reference section.

Related: 5 Reasons Why WordPress Is The Best Platform for SEO

If you wonder when you should use no-follow attributes, we’ll show you where they belong:

• Comments
• Forums
• Paid links
• “Untrusted content” (by Google).

Even though links are with no follow attribute in comments, forums or on Wikipedia, they can lead to a big amount of conversions. Wikipedia is very strict in terms of links in references. You must provide unique content and very closely related to the content on Wikipedia site.

But, if you get your link in references in Wikipedia, results can be fantastic. That’s one of the best stages to be spotted.

So, despite being no-follow, it drives traffic and you might earn some great links.

How to Find No Follow Links (Extensions?)

If you want to find out what links are do-follow or no-follow,  you can easily do that, no matter what browser you use. If you’re using Google Chrome: right click > View page source. Then shows the source of the page. Nofollow attributes can be found in link tags.

If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can do this the same way like on Google Chrome:

right click > View Page Source

SEO professionals usually like to track no follow links on sites. So, there are a few extensions that can help you find no-follow attributes. Those are SEO Quake, SearchStatus (Mozilla Firefox), NoFollow Simple (Google Chrome), etc.

Getting Follow Links

When getting links on your site, it makes sense that you want do-follow links.

How to get them?

You simply need to create good and relevant content that provides useful information. This is the best way to get your content shared and linked to naturally.

Likewise, you can get follow links through blogs and articles. Bloggers can write content relevant to yours so they can link some part of the article to your site.

Conclusion

Follow links are links that lead to other websites. The more follow links your site has, the better the SEO you’ll have. No-follow links don’t count in link juice and they are invented in purpose to stop spamming and getting follow links through spamming.

Today, whole SEO is much more complex, but more effective because of including no follow links.

No-follow links can be found through the page source on every browser, but also there are some extensions that detect automatically no follow links.

To get follow links, you’ll need quality and relevant content that others will recognize. Similarly, other can link to you through blogs and articles because they found your site very useful.