Introduction to No-Follow and Do-Follow Backlinks & Their Importance - SEO Tutorial Series - # 15th

Welcome to the fifteenth episode of my SEO tutorial series. In the last tutorial, we discussed the backlinks like what are they and the broad categories of backlinks. I couldn't cover everything in that tutorial and I said there that I'll do another tutorial for explaining more concepts.

There, we discussed the no-follow and do-follow backlinks. Though the last post was meant as an introduction to backlinks, if you haven't read that post, then I'll suggest you go there and read it now, then come back here. But if you still want to continue with this one, then it's fine.

I'll repeat a few important things here. Let me start now with the types of backlinks:

• No-follow backlinks
• Do-follow backlinks

No need of scratching your head because we're going to look into them in detail and I'll explain all the possible related things with them. This tutorial might be one of the most important tutorials because it focuses on the core part of Off-Page SEO. If you do well with proper On-Page and Off-Page SEO, then trust me! you'll make a fortune for yourself.

History of Backlinks and How types of backlinks came into existence:

Image Credits: Al-Fanar Media

If you go back at least 10 years back, then you'll find out that ranking your website on the first page was very easy. You just needed a moderate level of On-Page SEO, then you could just start commenting on blogs and produce a backlink by linking your site from the external site. Then you could see your website in the Top 10 results.

But if you stop living in the past, you'd know that now it sounds like a "dream" and "too good to be true". Do you want to know the reason why it doesn't work that way now? That's because of spammers. Earlier, it was very easy to rank using spam bots that create thousands of backlinks in just 10 minutes for you.

You can guess the quality of content of spammers. This trend pushed Google to work for the solution and create such an algorithm which could recognize the best content on the searched term's subject. Then Google introduced two types of backlinks. That's the history in short.

Link Juice:

Image Credit: BiteMyWords

It refers to the benefit you are taking from external sites' metrics. In order to create a backlink, the first step is to find a site with good metrics. Good metrics refers to:

• High Domain Authority
• High Page Authority
• High Trust Flow
• Low Citation Flow

When you create a backlink on high-quality site, it passes some juice to your site and as a result, your sites' metrics improve with time. There is no fixed rule as to how much link juice it will pass. This is something that is kept in secret by the SEO industry. Not even MOZ tell the truth about it. I guess that's to prevent spammers from calculated attacks.

But you should know that not every link passes link-juice. Webmasters are now very cautious on this subject and most of the sites won't allow passing any link juice. Commenting strategy is "almost" dead because webmasters now implement the new type of code on their site to disable passing link-juice. Why? You'll find the answer in my coming tutorials.

No-Follow backlinks:

Image Credits: Wordstream

Now as we covered the basics which were required to understand the difference between no-follow and do-follow backlinks. Let me define the no-follow backlink:

No-follow is a backlink type that enables webmasters to prevent passing link-juice to a certain site/URL. Either they can turn the complete site into a no-follow type using some well-known plugins OR the can manually decide which site should get link-juice from their site and which one shouldn't.

In short, a no-follow link doesn't pass any link-juice to your webpage.

This is how no-follow link looks like:

<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

As you can see, the link uses "nofollow" tag which indicates the Google bot and other bots that they shouldn't take the backlink to website.com seriously and just ignore the link-juice.

Do-Follow:

Image Credits: WebSigmas

Do-follow is a link that passes the link-juice to your site. It means that your article will rank well on Google if you have some high-quality do-follow backlinks.

Do-follow backlink doesn't need any tag like "dofollow". When you post a link without any tags, it will be considered as a do-follow link.

Does it mean that we should only build Do-Follow backlinks?

As I said it before, Off-Page SEO is something over which you can't have complete control. Therefore, if you want to create backlinks for your article/website, you must mix both types of backlinks to make your link profile look more genuine than doubtful.

The thing is, when your site starts to perform well, you will attract the manual inspection from the Google staff and they'll manually check your link-profiles. If they see that all of your links are do-follow, then it might give them a wrong impression that you are a fraudster. That is why it is advised to keep both types of backlinks. We will talk more about it in my coming tutorials.

Previous Tutorials:

1st: How to Optimize Your Steemit Content for Search Engines
2nd: How To Give Your Steemit Content Even More Visibility In Search Engines And Beat Your Competitors
3rd: How To Benefit From Images You Use In Your Steemit Content - Internal & External Links - The Proven Method
4th: How To Generate Steemit Content Ideas - Keyword Research - Exact Search Volume Of Keywords From Google!
5th: Turn One Keyword Into Thousands Within Minutes - Long Tail Keywords - The Proven Keyword Research Technique
6th: Understanding The Leading SEO Metrics - Domain Authority And Page Authority
7th: Understanding The King Of Metrics In SEO Industry - Majestic - Trust Flow And Citation Flow
8th: An Introduction To Semrush - Keyword Estimated Traffic Calculation And Difficulty Score By Semrush
9th: Keyword Difficulty Analysis - The Second Core Part Of SEO - How To Find Out Your Ability To Compete - Steemit Metrics
10th: How To Perform Keyword Difficulty Analysis - The First Complete Strategy Explained - Can You Beat Your Competitors?
11th: Keyword Analysis Made Easy - Find Out The Competition Of Keywords In One-Click - The Proven Method Revealed
12th: How To Automate Your Keyword Analysis Task - Analyze Thousands Of Keywords With The Blazing Speed
13th: The Summary Of All The Proven Strategies Related To On-Page SEO
14th: Introduction To Off-Page SEO & The Strategy Of Social Networks To Boost Rankings With Social Signals
15th: Introduction To Backlinks And The Backlinks History