Links

[tigress]

What are "do follow" and "no follow" links? How do you identify each? How do they affect traffic and rankings?

[Martin]

If your website link is on a nofollow page then it means that your link will not be crawled by SE. Though, it will give you some amount of traffic but it will not be considered a backlink in terms of google.

Wheras, Dofollow allow search engine to crawl links. Also, these links are considered as Backlinks.

Dofollow links affect ranking and traffic of your website.

Identifying Nofollow link:-

If you right click on the link and click on Properties then it will show you the message under the results which says "Relation: external nofollow". This mean that the link is Nofollow.

[Joseph]

Basically, "dofollow" links from other sites are considered as referral links/backlinks to your site. If your site has "dofollow" links from 1000 sites, it means that 1000 sites on the Internet are referrals to your site and this is what is considered by search engines. "dofollow" links will help you to get good rankings and traffic but "nofollow" links will only give you traffic and won't help you to get good rankings as they are not considered as referral links/backlinks by search engines

Originally Posted by Martin

Identifying Nofollow link:-

If you right click on the link and click on Properties then it will show you the message under the results which says "Relation: external nofollow". This mean that the link is Nofollow.

There is another method to find out if the link is "dofollow" or "nofollow".

You can right click on the page where the link is placed and select 'page source'. Once you click page source, you will get a page with coding of the site. Now, you can press control+F on your keyboard and write "nofollow". If you find "nofollow" near the link, the link is "nofollow"

"dofollow" if generally not used and hence you should look for "nofollow". If you find "nofollow" near the link then the link is "nofollow", otherwise, the link is "dofollow"

[tigress]

Thank you so much for the enlightening replies. May I know who decides to make the links "do follow" or "no follow"? How do you make your links a "do follow" or a "no follow" one?
How do you make links to your website "do follow"?

[PeterWatts]

I am out of budget and in the last week of month, my site exceeds the allocated bandwidth. I cannot upgrade due to this recession.

If I can only get traffic from "nofollow" links and it cannot help me in ranking then can I remove them as I need only helpful traffic on my site?

[carl owen]

Originally Posted by tigress

Thank you so much for the enlightening replies. May I know who decides to make the links "do follow" or "no follow"? How do you make your links a "do follow" or a "no follow" one?
How do you make links to your website "do follow"?

Well, when it comes to making the links of the site "dofollow" or "nofollow", the site owner decides whether they should be "nofollow" or "dofollow"

If you have programmed your site in HTML and you have good knowledge about it, you can make the links "dofollow" or "nofollow" according to you. You can also make specific links of the site "dofollow" and the other links "nofollow" according to your choice

[MattBarthorp]

Originally Posted by tigress

How do you make links to your website "do follow"?

You need to make changes in the code or .htaccess of the website. You can ask your web developer to do it for you.