What is DoFollow? What is NoFollow? What’s The Difference?

So what is this DoFollow/NoFollow Nonsense?

If you’ve been reading about SEO, link building or backlinks you’ve probably seen people throwing around the terms “dofollow” and “nofollow” when talking about types of links.
Making a link seems pretty straight forward… you type some words (that become your “anchor text”) and then you add the link code (anchor code), that magically makes them clickable. For most people that means using the little chain-link icon in their text editor.
What you don’t see in the visual side of things – and sometimes not in even the editable html – until after its published and live on your page – is the little bit of information that sometimes gets tacked on that tells Google’s “spiders” (aka “robots”) whether or not they should crawl from your page to the page you linked to and give the page some of your “link juice”.  Now I put link juice in quotes because its not something you can go to the Family Grocery and pick up a bottle of for breakfast! Link juice is a term we use to describe the SEO value or credit that your page has – and has to share with links you make.
If I make a link in wordpress that looks like this.
Then the code looks like this:

this

Then, wordpress and most other blogging platforms, auto-magically add this bit of code to links in the comment section…

rel="external nofollow"

This tells Google’s spiders/robots not to follow the link, even though I didn’t specifically add nofollow wordpress does when it displays it on the page.
So now, if I would go to a regular blog post and highlight over the name-link of the commenter, then right click and select view source, I now see that the link looks like:

Bill Gates

Now it turns out there is no real “doFollow”… that is simply the absence of the “noFollow” code being applied.
Fortunately, you don’t really need to understand that to know how to benefit from it…

Putting Your DoFollow Knowledge To Use

(Understand these numbers/totals are for illustration purposes and are kinda hypothetical but prove the point.)
All you really need to know is that, from an SEO standpoint, a DoFollow link may be considered 10x better than a NoFollow link.
Every time you leave a comment on a blog, by default you get one nofollow link from the name-url link. You also get a second nofollow if commentluv is enabled.
So a comment on a typical syndication-ready blog gives you 2 points: one for the name-url link and one for the commentluv link. (Total 2 points)
Now my blog isn’t fully DoFollow (see my post on Lucy’s Linky Love). The name-url field becomes DoFollow once you’ve left 3 comments. Lucy’s does not seem able to strip the no-follow out of commentluv. So essentially after 3 comments, your comments each of your comments become worth 1 point for commentluv (nofollow) and 10 points for the name-url link (dofollow), and a few more points, perhaps 2 if you used keywordluv for the anchor text. (Total 13points)
Now if you head over to Sire’s blog, where he is fully DoFollow, and get a dofollow for both the name-url (10pts) and commentluv (10pts) and also use his keywordluv (2pts), you’re sitting at a very pretty total! (Total 22points)

Now… here’s the simple part…

You only have so many hours in the day that you can spend leaving comments to get quality back links for your blog.
If you want to gain a hypothetical 100points in backlink SEO today…
Will you leave 50 comments  on a typical syndication ready blog, 8 comments on a intermediary blog, or 5 comments on a full DoFollow blog
Looks like a no-brainer right? You’re going to look for the full/partial DoFollow blogs with commentluv & keywordluv to maximize your efforts!

TL;DR

DoFollow Links Much Better Than NoFollow Links

As promised, here’s the “too long, didn’t read” version:
DoFollow links are approximately ten times as good as NoFollow links. Any time you can comment on a DoFollow instead of a NoFollow blog you should. DoFollow is a great way to say thank-you to your blog visitors. Keywordluv works with DoFollow to give you even better SEO anchor text.

Summary

Hopefully this helped you get a better understanding of what NoFollow is and what DoFollow is and why they’re important to you! Be sure to check out my post on Keywordluv and Lucy’s Linky Love for more information on how to not only install those but how to use them here on my blog. If I decide to keep the math plugin, I will likely go full DoFollow as spam is the biggest downside. Please take a look at keywordluv and begin to put it into action. That’s a plugin that bloggers run FOR their visitors and it makes me sad when I see people not making the most of it! DoFollow links are incredibly valuable for SEO