What Are Dofollow And Nofollow Links?

Despite the fact that, since 2014, Google has retired Page Rank, one of the algorithms for determining the authority of pages, link juice is still transmitted and matters to the site. Search bots analyze all page links when crawling a site. The webmaster decides whether it is necessary to pass weight by links - for this they use dofollow and nofollow, the values of the rel attribute of the "a" tag.

What is dofollow link

Dofollow links are links on a site with the dofollow attribute instructing search engine robots to follow the link and crawl that page . For internal links, the dofollow attribute is required. Links with the dofollow value pass the PR and the anchor, this attribute value tells the search bot that the link can be followed and indexed:

All links where this parameter is not set are considered dofollow by default. With dofollow, everything is relatively clear - they are indexed, anchors are taken into account, the weight is transferred. Let's look at the features of links with nofollow.

What is nofollow link

Nofollow is an attribute of the a tag indicating to search robots that the link does not need to be taken into account (literally “do not follow”) when distributing weight , unlike the noindex tag , the link is indexed and PS bots can follow it, but will not be taken into account when transferring weight, unlike from Dofollow to the default value. nofollow is written in the rel tag. Like this:

How Google feels about nofollow

Google Webmaster Help says that the nofollow setting prevents search bots from following links. Such links do not transfer link weight, so they are not taken into account when calculating the link weight of acceptors. The help also says that the rel="nofollow" attribute prevents the PR from being sent.

From Google's 2005 official statement on the introduction of nofollow:

“If you're a blogger (or blog reader), you've seen comments from people trying to rank their sites up by leaving links like 'Visit my pharmaceutical site'. It's called spam and we don't like it either. We tested a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the rel="nofollow" attribute in hyperlinks, those links do not receive weight."

It is worth noting that the Help says: “As a rule, the transition is not made” - we can conclude that bots consider nofollow as a recommendation, and not as a strict ban. In addition, in the Search Console in the "Links to your site" report, you can also find nofollow links, that is, the search engine perceives them anyway. This means that the weight will not be transferred, but bots can follow these links.

Attributes for advertising and custom links

In the fall of 2019, Google introduced new attributes for sponsored links:

According to Google representatives, these attributes are needed to make it easier for search bots to determine the nature of the appearance of links. In fact, they partly replace nofollow. Update support is already in place, but Google is not pushing to replace attributes in old links.

The search engine also reports that several attributes can be applied to one link at once, but from March 1, 2020, it can ignore any prohibitive attributes, that is, any links can affect positions in the search results.

You can read more about advertising attributes in the article .

How Yandex treats nofollow

Previously, Yandex had only its own noindex tag as an alternative to nofollow, which closed part of the page text from indexing, but since 2010, the search engine began to support nofollow too - to prohibit indexing of individual links. Noindex worked only in Yandex and Rambler, Google did not support it, which caused a lot of inconvenience for webmasters.

Noindex can be used in combination with nofollow, this will limit the transfer of link weight and search bots will not pay attention to it. The Yandex.Help section on indexing says that the rel="nofollow" attribute prevents the bot from following and indexing the link.

According to a study by Alexei Trudov , if you use the inlink operator to search by anchor list, it turns out that Yandex takes into account all nofollow link anchors. It can be concluded that the weight is transferred, but there is no exact data on the deduction of the transferred weight.

Links from search engines

Links from VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks contain nofollow, so they should not affect rankings in Yandex and Google.

SEO specialist and director of the Remarka studio Dmitry Shakhov also believes that posts with links in social networks do not transfer weight to pages:

"... If something is transmitted there, then it is behavioral from those users who click on this link."

Links from social networks do not transfer weight, but are taken into account in the Webmaster panel in Yandex. Sergey Devaka Koksharov conducted an experiment in 2015 and found out that links from Twitter are taken into account in the Webmaster panel, despite nofollow and 301 redirects. From Odnoklassniki are not taken into account, because they are closed for indexing. From Youtube, links appear from closed nofollow descriptions to the video and from the accounts of users who recently liked it. VKontakte does not put direct links to sites in posts, but always uses 302 redirects, so Yandex displays vk.com/away.php constructs.

Sergey also reported that links from the settings of public pages that do not have the “post” parameter in the URL are always taken into account and displayed.

In any case, if links from social networks do not transmit weight, they serve as a signal to search engines that the pages of the sites to which these links lead are of interest to users. For example, in 2010, Google's Matt Cutts stated that the search engine pays attention to links from social networks.

Nofollow Links - Impact on SEO

Why nofollow is needed:

The ratio of dofollow and nofollow on the site

There are no clear recommendations on the number and ratio. Everything search engines say: less spam and commercial anchors. It is better to delete links of poor quality, close SEO links with nofollow for Yandex or with new Google advertising attributes. You can get sanctions for spamming links.

Yandex: sanctions for links

"Minusinsk" - reduces positions for spam links on pages if the number of links with commercial anchors exceeds 40% of the total link mass or there are only more than 500 purchased links on the site.

"Nepot" closes the accounting of purchased links. It is advised to put no more than five external links in one block, so as not to get sanctions.

Google: penalties for links

"Penguin" cancels the weight of purchased links.Filter "Links Garbage (Links)" punishes the indiscriminate sale of links from their pages. The allowed number of links is no more than five per page. Which links don't pass weight

Polish specialist Max Sayrek conducted an experiment for three months that showed that link equity is not transmitted via links via JavaScript — onclick="window.location.href ='page4.html'", although crawlers perceive them and follow them.

Similarly with links through a JavaScript function - class="js-link" data-url="page9.html". In this case, for some reason, the page to which the link led was visited by the crawler more often than others in this category.

The Google bot ignored links through a JavaScript function with encoded data - class="js-link" data-url="cGFnZTEwLmh0bWw=" and links with a dynamic parameter - page2.html?parameter=1.

Also, the link with the anchor did not pass the weight - page2.html #testhash , at the request of the anchor, the page did not appear in the index.

Brief recommendations: