What is Dofollow Link?
Dofollow is a descriptor of links describing that search engines crawl them and count them as votes of quality.
By default, all links are dofollow links unless they are modified to be nofollow links manually or are automatically changed by a website setting.
Search engines crawlers follow dofollow links. In other words, they continue to crawl other pages they discover through standard links.
Dofollow links pass along what the SEO community commonly calls “link juice.” Links are a vote for quality. By learning which webpages are often linked to, search engines can determine how highly websites should rank in search results. Links are just one of many ranking factors.
In contrast, nofollow links have a bit of code that ask search engines to not crawl them or count them as votes of quality. Sometimes you may not be able to vouch for all links on your website, especially if they are user submitted or links to advertisements.
In bold is what a nofollow implementation looks like in HTML:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://raventools.com">great seo tools</a>
A dofollow value is simply a descriptor since a dofollow value for the rel attribute doesn’t exist in HTML. So, dofollow links are technically any links that don’t have an rel attribute with a nofollow value.
Here is an example of what a dofollow link looks like in HTML:
<a href="http://raventools.com">great seo tools</a>
You don’t have to do anything when creating a new link to make it a dofollow link, unless a website setting is changing the code you add.
Link Resources
- The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building from Moz
- Chrome NoFollow Detector Extension
- Discover NoFollow Links with Site Auditor
Link Experts
Synonyms
- Follow Links
- Juice-Passing Links
- Do Follow Links
- DoFollow Links
For additional information, read our article that digs into the question – What is a Backlink?