Businesses invest a lot of time and money for backlinks and knowing if its a do-follow or nofollow link is crucial if you are one who if trying to understand you may have to explore this article, which basically explains,

• What are backlinks
• The types of backlinks (Follow, Nofollow)
• Objectives of backlinks
• How to check the follow and nofollow backlinks
• Which types of backlinks are good

And more

1. Does your website have links from external websites?
2. Or your website is giving links to other websites?

In either case, you can’t ignore understanding the link type, as many websites on the internet have moved from do-follow to nofollow links and meanwhile you may do a mistake of providing do-follow backlinks to other websites.

Basic of Backlinks:

What are Backlinks:

A hyperlink placed on other website pointing to your website, which potentially allows bots to visit your website from those websites or can drive visitors from that website to your website. An external website which potentially can send its users to your websites or bots through hyperlinks is known as backlink.

Types of backlinks:

There are two types of backlinks, Do-follow or Follow Backlinks An external link which can allow bots to visit your website through their website is known as a do follow link.

Technically speaking in the anchor tag, the rel= attribute is follow, which tells bots to follow the destination link through them,

E.G: <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”follow” >Sample Link</a>

In the anchor tag if rel attribute is not used its still a follow/ do-follow link.

Nofollow Backlinks:

No-follow backlinks can only send the real user to the destination page through the hyperlink or anchor tag and bots won’t be able to crawl the website through those links.

Technically speaking in the anchor tag the rel attribute will be mentioned no-follow,

E.G: <a href=”https://example.com” rel=”nofollow” >Sample Link</a>

Objectives of Backlinks:

If you have mistake backlinks for DA or PA improvement or for referring traffic its utterly wrong and you may have to go through an article on “The importance of backlinks“, so that you will be able to understand the purpose of backlinks in SEO.

How To Check follow and Nofollow backlinks:

There are tons of paid and free tools to check this, but then I am going to show you the two simple methods of understanding it,

Method 1: Inspect Element:

This is a simple and a manual method of finding if the link is a follow or no-follow link and this doesn’t work when you have to check too many anchor tags or hyperlinks on the webpage.

To check the follow link,

Always place your cursor on the hyperlink and right click and you will see the screen as shown in the below image,

Click on inspect element:

You can now see the HTML of the hyperlink, an anchor tag with or without a rel attribute mention. If you come across rel= follow or rel is not available at all then its a do-follow (follow) link. In case if you find rel=no-follow, then it’s a no-follow link, where bots cannot follow this hyperlink.

Method 2: An extension for Browser

This is an automated method and helps you to check it for multiple hyperlinks on any webpage you visit, you don’t have to inspect element. To enable this feature on your browser you just need to follow the below steps you can simply visit a chrome extension section, look for any of the plugins that highlights the no-follow link and install it and then enable it,

Here there are two

no-follow marker extensions, you can install and enable one of them. Alternatively, you can search on Google for chrome or firefox nofollow backlink checker browser extension and enable it,

Whenever the tool is enabled you can see it marking the no-follow links as shown in the below image in the red dots, in this image it is no-follow for the social share buttons. If it is not round red dotted when it is enabled it a do-follow (follow) link.

To cross check for its correctness you can do a inspect element and make note,

So,

the extension is working perfectly.

Which type of backlinks are Good (Follow or Nofollow):

Follow a good one to implement or nofollow a good one to implement is dependent on the type of link its is, If you are giving a link to other website or external website always prefer to have it as a no-follow link. As you shouldn’t be passing the bot energy to the external websites until and unless you have enough crawl resource for bots to crawl your website effectively. If you are receiving link to your website from external website make sure its a follow link, as that’s the only link type that helps your website to get crawled frequently by the bots coming from different websites each time and in turn your website starts ranking for the keywords related to it, or you would see a very quick SEO progress of your website.

Conclusion:

After knowing the differences and importance of follow and nofollow backlinks one has to correct their incoming and outgoing links accordingly. Not handling this properly may lead to poor result of your website and websites or webmaster who have this in place usually see a good progress with the seo.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.