Throughout Google's evolution and exponential growth, it has always been rooted in the idea of links from one website to another. If a website links out to relevant content on an outside page, that is a sign that the destination site is authoritative and offers high-quality information--at least on a specific topic.
That reputation for authority and high-quality adds up. Google gives it weight known as "link juice."
Link juice is passed on from one website to another through one-way, outbound links called backlinks. The value of link juice increases with the authority of the domain. When a link is followed by search crawlers, it passes on link juice to the pages it refers to. There is an exception that we'll get into here: a "nofollow" link keeps the juice from passing along. (More on that in a moment.)
Backlinks can be found in various sections of websites. They can be embedded within the text content of a webpage, leading directly to another website's landing page. Additionally, backlinks can be included in images and infographics, serving as a link to another website. Some websites also include backlinks in their footer section, using those to connect to partner sites.
Generally, in-content links are generally considered more valuable than links found in the footer, or those located within comments. When a backlink is positioned at the top of a page, particularly within the main content area, it signifies that the link is given priority and is more likely to be recognized by search engine crawlers, such as Google's spider.
Even though Google hasn’t changed the importance of backlinks, they have introduced different types of backlinks that determine how the search engine handles links between websites.
Types of Links
Hyperlinks vs Backlinks
In general, all links are hyperlinks. It was a longer way to describe an outbound link to another site, but that term has been shortened over the years. Backlinks are hyperlinks from other sites that come to your site.
External Links vs Backlinks
External links come from your site and go to others. If you link to socks.com from your page, that is an external link on your site and a backlink for socks.com.
Internal links vs Backlinks
Backlinks come from other sites, but internal links are links between pages on your website. They are an important part of your site structure, and that indirectly builds up your SEO strength. We talk in depth about the importance of internal links in this guide.
The Types of Backlinks
As far as SEO juice goes, there are only two types of backlinks: dofollow and nofollow. A person reading a web page will never see the difference between a dofollow and a nofollow backlink. The difference is in the source code. There’s a specific tag in the source code that determines how Google and the other search engines view the backlink, which also determines the effect of that backlink on your SEO profile.
dofollow Backlinks
Dofollow backlinks are the most common and valuable type of backlink for SEO.
When you put a dofollow link on your website, you’re telling Google that the link is organic — as in, the target website didn’t buy the link—and that you’re vouching for the accuracy of the content at the other end of that link.
Dofollow is simply telling Google and the other search engines that “the content on the other end of this link is important and should be noted.”
For example, this link is a dofollow backlink to our friends over at Internet Marketing Ninjas. The source code for that link looks like this:
Notice how there’s nothing different about that link? It’s just a regular link. That’s one of the reasons that dofollow links are the most common — they’re the easiest to put in place.
nofollow
Nofollow backlinks are less common. They’re also less valuable. They’re intentional tags, used to tell search engines to ignore a particular link.
Google suggests using the nofollow tag to tell search engines that you don't specifically want your site associated with the target.
It is commonly used when you don't want to imply any endorsem*nt or pass ranking credit to another page.
The HTML markup for these links is similar to dofollow links, with one big difference — the “rel=nofollow” tag. If we used a nofollow link on our example from above, it would look like this:
The percentage of dofollow versus nofollow links that a website has will vary. Google wants to see a good mix of both for a healthy link profile. Even determining the difference between nofollow and dofollow links can help you find that right balance.
The biggest difference between these two types of links is that Google places a lot of value on dofollow links — which means they’re great for SEO. Nofollow links, on the other hand, are ignored by Google’s algorithm in most cases. That means they’re rarely valuable for SEO.
However...
Backlinks, overall, play a crucial role in improving brand awareness by bringing traffic to your website from other websites, which in turn helps reaching out to a larger audience.
These links may have a nofollow attribute attached, which means they do not directly pass on any link juice to your site, but they still bring traffic and enhance brand visibility.
By building a diverse profile of quality backlinks, your website is more likely to show up in search engine results, which can put your brand in front of potential customers who may not have found you otherwise. Additionally, getting mentioned on reputable websites can help establish credibility and trust with your target audience while increasing brand authority in your industry.
Where to safely get nofollow links
Despite the fact that nofollow links are less common than dofollow links, there are still plenty of places on the internet to pick up nofollow links. You’ll most often get these types of backlinks from websites where you can upload your own links and content, because those websites don’t want to vouch for the accuracy of your content.
Here are a few places that nofollow links commonly come from:
- Social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
- Blog comments
- Content aggregation websites, such as Scoop It
- Q&A websites, such as Quora
- Forums, such as Reddit
- Press releases
Links to a website can be left on various online platforms, including social media sites, industry directories, and review sites, when creating a business profile or adding a guest post. However, it's important to note that most of these backlinks may be labeled as nofollow.
Many high-authority websites, like Wikipedia and the Huffington Post, use nofollow links to reduce the number of spammy backlink requests they receive.
Despite this, these links can still contribute to brand building efforts. Some of that is from brand recognition, but most is from actual traffic.
Nofollow backlinks are useful for SEO
Surprisingly, nofollow backlinks do provide some SEO value.
Google’s official stance on nofollow links is, “In general, we don't follow them.” That means that Google doesn't follow the nofollow links most of the time, but there are certain circ*mstances in which Google does follow the links. It’s hard to say what those circ*mstances are, because Google hasn’t shared that information. That's why the SEO community has done a lot of testing to identify a few instances when nofollow links are followed.
High-Authority Websites
We keep tossing around the concept of "authority," so let's talk about what makes a site earn that distinction.
Authority comes from putting out unique, helpful content in a particular area. Plumbers don't have to limit themselves to just plumbing services they offer. They can put out helpful videos about DIY garbage-disposal replacement. They can write about protecting pipes in extreme weather. They might not write about landscaping, though.
As they build up this content, they establish their expertise, but they also attract links from multiple sites. Together, those links from different sites are the website's link profile. By analyzing the backlink profile, you can gain a deeper understanding of the overall strength, authority, and credibility of the website.
You can analyze a website's backlink profile through a few online tools. SpyFu, for instance, lets you type in the domain to get all of its ranking backlinks. This is a collection of good quality links that are indexed by Google. An indexed backlink will give you a bigger SEO boost, and it helps assure you of its trustworthiness. It increases the chances of your page being found by Google, maximizing the impact of your link.
Website authority plays a significant role in determining a website's ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
A domain's overall authority is measured by various factors. It weighs the number of backlinks, the relevance of the linking websites, the anchor text used, and the overall quality of the links. Essentially, the backlink profile reveals the extent to which other websites find the website valuable enough to link to it, indicating its level of influence and trustworthiness within the online community.
Links from High-Profile Websites
There’s some evidence that nofollow links from authoritative, high-profile websites, like Wikipedia, can improve your organic rankings.
The thinking is that there are websites that Google completely trusts. Those websites are known for content that is extremely high quality. That means if those websites are linking to another website, that linked website is also valuable. In that case, Google will somewhat ignore the nofollow link.
It’s unlikely that they’re completely ignoring the nofollow tag in those cases. If you were to pick up a dofollow link from Wikipedia, that would still be much more valuable than a nofollow link from the same source.
There are probably very few websites that fall into this category.
Buying nofollow links
Adam White, the creator of SEOJet, wanted to find out how nofollow links affected SEO. He went to one website that ranked for a number of SEO terms and paid for them to place a nofollow backlink to his website. He asked them to use the anchor text “backlink software” because his website didn’t rank on page 1 for that keyword. He also made sure that no other links pointing to his website had that anchor text.
The use of that anchor text is important because anchor text helps Google understand what your website is all about when someone links to your website using specific keywords in the link.
Within a week of the nofollow placement, SEOJet’s website shot up to the number one ranking for that keyword.
It is possible that the timing is a coincidence, but Adam claims that the nofollow link was the only change he made to his website during that period. It’s worth pointing out that this is just one test and not something that’s guaranteed to work, but it’s worth testing further.
Luckily for us, that’s exactly what Rand Fishkin did. He ran a test in which he asked a number of website owners to link to a specific web page using a nofollow tag. The results weren’t huge, but they did show a slight increase in rankings.
The target web page for his experiment went from the ninth spot in Google’s SERP, up to the sixth spot. A three-spot improvement isn’t huge, but it is still surprising, considering that Google claims it doesn’t take nofollow links into account.
Indirect benefits of nofollow links
Perhaps the biggest reason you’ll want a nofollow link is the indirect benefits of gaining one. According to Fractl, one nofollow backlink from a highly trafficked website can result in plenty of dofollow backlinks. That’s often because content creators use those highly trafficked websites to research their own content.
Fractl proved this by getting a nofollow link to a piece of content from a Yahoo article. Once that Yahoo article was published, Fractl’s content gained an additional 700 backlinks from other websites — two-thirds of which were dofollow links.
The other indirect benefit of nofollow links is that those links still pass traffic to your website, which is obviously better than no link at all.
To sum it up, we don’t have any concrete evidence to say that nofollow links are good, but there is enough anecdotal evidence to prove that they aren’t bad. If you’re planning any link-building campaigns, don’t ignore the websites that only give out nofollow links, especially if they’re bigger, high-authority websites. They’re still valuable in terms of traffic, exposure, and even a bit of SEO.
When should you use dofollow and nofollow backlinks?
For the most part, you’ll want to use dofollow links when linking to other websites from your website. As long as you’re linking to valuable resources that help your readers, there’s no reason not to use a dofollow link.
If, for whatever reason, you’re linking to a number of low-quality websites, you might want to consider using a nofollow tag so Google doesn’t think you’re vouching for the quality and accuracy of those low-quality websites.
That isn’t the only reason you’ll use a nofollow tag, though. According to Google, there are three other situations in which you’ll want to use nofollow links.
1) You don’t have control over what gets posted
If you have a forum or comments section as part of your website, you’ll want to nofollow all links that people post there. This will help reduce spam comments on your blog or forum. If people know they can’t get dofollow links from your website, they’ll be less likely to post a ton of irrelevant links.
Hacker News does this perfectly. The main links from their website are all dofollow, but the links in the comments are all nofollow.
The links that are highlighted in green — the link to the main content and internal links — are all dofollow. The top comment, which includes an external link, is highlighted in purple because it is a nofollow link.
2) Someone paid you to link to their website
Backlinks are supposed to be organic. If someone paid you in some way to promote their website, you need to nofollow that link. That will help search engines understand that the link isn’t valuable for organic search because it was manipulated.
If you don’t nofollow a paid link, Google could penalize you. Here are all of the types of links that you should nofollow:
- Link-for-money exchanges: If someone offers to pay you for a link from your website, you need to nofollow that link.
- Product-for-link exchanges: If someone sends you their product to try out in exchange for a link, you must use a nofollow tag on that link.
- Link-for-link exchanges: If someone offers to link to your website if you’ll link to theirs, you better nofollow that link.
- Keyword-rich anchor text link guest posts: Guest posting is generally okay, except when the post has an excessive number of dofollow links back to the author’s website. You need to nofollow those links.
- Contract-required links: If your customer contracts require that they link back to your website, you better make sure they’re nofollowing those links.
Essentially, if you’re linking to another website for any nonorganic reason, you’d be safer to use a nofollow tag. You don’t want to get penalized by Google for a simple link-tag mistake.
3) You’re worried about crawl prioritization
Crawl prioritization is generally something that only very large websites have to worry about. If you have a huge number of web pages, Google might have trouble figuring out which are the most important pages to index.
If you have pages on your website that are noindexed, any internal links to those pages should be nofollowed. That will keep search-engine bots focused on the parts of your website that matter.
For example, let’s say you don’t want search engines to index your login page. Any links on your website that direct users to that login page should have the nofollow tag.
How to identify nofollow backlinks
If you’re not sure about the types of backlinks that certain web pages are using, there are a few easy ways to check.
First, you can take a quick look at the source code. We’ll use the same example from Hacker News.
If you’re using Google Chrome, right-click anywhere on the web page and select “View page source.” From there, find the link in the HTML of the page. If that link has a nofollow tag, you’ll see it right after the URL.
For the Hacker News example, the Imgur link has the rel=“nofollow” tag right after the URL.
That process, while simple, isn’t always guaranteed to work. Some websites are built in a way that won’t allow you to understand the HTML. The Q&A website Quora is a good example. The page itself looks like any other content page that you’ll find on the internet.
You can’t tell whether those two links are nofollow or dofollow. If you look at their source code, it’s unreadable and unsearchable. You won’t be able to find the content or the links anywhere in that source code.
When you run into websites like that, you can use a Chrome plugin such as NoFollow or MozBar to highlight the links that have the nofollow tag.
Here’s what that looks like using MozBar on a Quora page:
The two links in that screenshot are highlighted in purple because they’re nofollow links. If they were dofollow links, they would be highlighted in green.
How to get more dofollow backlinks
As we mentioned earlier, dofollow backlinks are the most valuable. They’re the ones that make a big difference for your SEO. That’s why it’s important to always search for ways to get more dofollow backlinks.
There are a number of ways to get dofollow backlinks by creating content. You can take a page from Rand Fishkin’s book and create 10x content, which is content that is 10x better than any of the top-ranking articles for that keyword. If you’re able to pull that off, you should gain backlinks organically.
You can also get backlinks by writing high-quality posts for other websites and including a link back to your website. As long as you use only one or two dofollow links in your guest post, you won’t run the risk of being penalized by Google.
If those two are working well for you, consider creating and publishing some original research. That’s a great way to get backlinks, because other authors will cite your research in their content.
If you’re already doing all three of those techniques, below are a few ways to get more dofollow backlinks that don’t require you to create more content.
1) Testimonials
You probably use a number of services, tools, and agencies to run your company. Chances are good that those companies have some sort of testimonial or case-study page on their website.
If they do, reach out and offer a testimonial or case study about their product. Most of the time, they’ll link back to your website in part of the testimonial.
Here’s a perfect example from Productboard:
That page is a case study that includes a dofollow link back to their customer, Slite.
2) Top X lists
In just about any industry, if you search for “top X <keyword>,” you’ll find listicle blog posts, which list a number of resources or companies that their readers should know about. If you come across a list like this that your company, product, or content isn’t on, reach out to the author and see whether they’d be willing to include you.
For example, let’s say you work in the medical-device industry and are putting on a conference. You want your conference web page to rank highly, and the best way to do that is to gain backlinks.
In that case, you’d search for “top medical device conferences.” You’ll see the first result is this one from Greenlight Guru.
From there, reach out to the author, Nick Tippmann, to find out whether he’d be willing to add your conference to that list.
You can repeat this exact process for just about any topic in your industry. Chances are, someone has written a listicle post about it.
3) Help a Reporter Out
We first heard about this technique from Backlinko, and it does take time and effort, but it really works.
The website, Help a Reporter Out (HARO), was created to connect journalists with experts. Once you register, you’ll get an email each day with a list of questions that reporters need answered. If you know the answer to a question, all you have to do is reply, and then you might end up with a high-quality backlink.
A lot of marketers use this technique, which means the reporters usually get a lot of responses, and they obviously can’t use all the responses. That’s why you need to give your best possible answer when replying to reporters’ questions. Spend time thinking about it and writing your response. You’ll have a much better chance of getting a featured quote if your answer is insightful and helps the reporter fill out their article.
Even if the reporter doesn’t include a backlink to your website in the published article, HARO is still a great way to get media coverage.
4) Broken link building
This technique is time-consuming but can work really well. The idea is to find websites that are linking to content similar to yours, but, for one reason or another, their link to that content is broken.
When you find instances like that, reach out to the site owner or author and tell them about the broken link. Then, mention that you have a resource that might be a better fit for that link anyway.
Site owners will want to fix broken links because they’re bad for user experience and bad for SEO. You’ll be helping them out by doing broken link building.
The best way to do this is by finding websites that are in your industry but aren’t competitors. Run their website through a broken-link checker, which will identify any broken links on that website.
When that tool returns a list of broken links, sort through the list to find places where your content can take the place of the broken link’s content. Then, reach out and let the site owner know about the broken link and suggest your content as an alternative.
5. Natural backlinks
Links from relevant, authoritative sources deliver powerful SEO value. There's no specific trick to getting these backlinks besides creating content, but you have to create link-worthy content. Try to include evergreen content and unique data into your strategy and give them a push by creating awareness about them.
6. Be a great guest
Guest posting has earned a polarizing reputation. Notably, it helps you earn a link from an authoritative site of your own choice. Critics say that guest posting doesn't work, but that's often because the original authors drop a post and leave. If you earn the opportunity to write a guest post, you need to follow through completely.
First, pitch a clear idea that matches their audience and then share unique, high-quality content. You want to demonstrate authority in your topic and make your host look good for giving you the spotlight. Set expectations up front about how many links you can send back to your own site within the body of your text (with a dofollow status), and stick to it.
After publishing, be sure to promote the article through your own social media and other available outlets. Return to the page and engage with any comments there as well as on social channels.
If you are lucky enough to post on sites with a strong link profile, in a related niche, you owe it to yourself and to the host site to work on the backend of the post through promotion and engagement. By bringing clicks to the host site, you get the benefits of a link from a strong page, and it sets you up to be welcomed back for future posts.
Backlinks to avoid completely
It's important to note that backlinks can also backfire. Paid backlinks, for example, can violate search engine guidelines and potentially result in penalties. Spammy backlinks that are low-quality or irrelevant can also harm your website's credibility and authority, and negatively impact your search engine rankings. It's always important to carefully consider the types of backlinks you pursue and prioritize those that are high-quality and relevant to your audience.
Websites with unnatural links are at a higher risk of ranking lower in search engine results or not appearing on SERPs at all, as a result of the Google's ongoing link spam updates. Fortunately, that's the extreme. These days it's more of a cautionary tale to deter you from making it a practice. Google announced that it will neutralize bad links, treating them as though they are not even on the page.
Don’t focus on one type of backlink over the other
The two types of backlinks are both important to your website’s overall link profile. Google wants to see a healthy link profile that consists of both nofollow and dofollow backlinks.
Too many nofollow links from low-authority sites might suggest to Google that you’re just spamming your content on the web. But too many dofollow backlinks could look just as suspicious, especially if they’re coming from low-authority websites.
While it’s important to understand the difference between these two types of backlinks, don’t focus too much on getting one type or the other — they can both be beneficial. Just focus on building links and let Google handle the rest.
