How to check whether a link is Do follow or No follow Backlinks?

Backlink is the most used terminology in SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Backlink is defined as the link that comes from other websites to a webpage. If you find a link on a website to any other website, then it is a backlink to that website.

Let us take an example:

If you want to meet the “The Biggest Losers who made it Really BIG” then Click here

In the above sentence Click here is linking to FoundersDesk.org and this is a backlink to FoundersDesk.org

Backlinks are very important for ranking a website in search engines. Backlinks are also responsible for getting you a lot of referral traffic. Now there are two types of backlinks and these are:

Do Follow Baklinks and No Follow Backlinks It is very confusing for new bloggers to understand what actually is the difference between a do follow backlink and a no follow backlink. This is because both nofollow and dofollow backlinks are alike. 

But here I will help you to get a complete overview of Both dofollow and nofollow links. Create a lot of Backlinks from these:

High PR Do Follow Social Bookmarking Sites List 2016 High Quality Profile Creation Sites List PDF Submission Sites List Free Search Engine Submission Sites

Contents

1 What is Do Follow Link? 

1.1 Benefits of Do Follow backlinks

2 What is No Follow Link? 

2.1 Benefits of Nofollow backlinks

3 How to check whether links is dofollow or nofollow?

 What is Do Follow Link? All the hyperlinks which correspond to any link is known as do follow link. All the hyperlinks are by default dofollow. Dofollow backlinks are those backlinks which are followed by the search engine bots. It directly gives you the benefit in search engine rankings. Do follow Backlinks passes complete link juice to the other website.

Example of Do Follow link:

rel=”dofollow” href=”http://Example.com”>Example

or it can simply be written as

Example

Dofollow links are the very very important ranking factor that is the reason why everyone is looking for do follow links.  There was a time when all the links present on the web was dofollow. The result was the more the number of external links of a website. The more higher rank it get in Search Engine Result Pages.

This very practice allowed spammers to spam the web with irrelevant websites coming on the top of Search Results. Then the need was felt to add some attribute which Search Engines can understand that they do not have to follow these links. Then comes the Nofollow links.

Benefits of Do Follow backlinks 

Do Follow Backlinks provides you pure link juice that will help you to rank higher in search engines. Do Follow Backlinks are responsible for obtaining higher Page Rank. More the number of dofollow backlinks more are the chances to get higher page rank. The more the dofollow backlinks a page have, the more are the chances of improvement of Page Rank. Referral Traffic is another great benefit of do follow links on the websites.

What is No Follow Link?

 Nofollow backlinks are the hyperlinks in a web page which are not followed by the Google bots. No follow links do not have much significance in the keyword ranking. But these are important as well. No follow links provide referral traffic and are useful in maintaining the domain authority.

Example of No Follow link:

rel=”nofollow” href=”http://Example.com”>Example

Benefits of Nofollow backlinks:

 No follow links also provide referral traffic like dofollow links. No follow backlinks help in increasing the authority of your website . It helps in increasing the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of your website. No follow backlinks also contribute to the keyword ranking in search engines but their contribution is too small. The real benefit of NoFollow tag is they are very helpful in stopping spam. Earlier all links were dofollow which allows spammers to spam the web and rank irrelavant pages in search engine result pages. All the comment boxes on the web automatically give nofollow attribute to the hyperlinks so that spam can be automatically nullified.

How to check whether links is dofollow or nofollow? 

There are some methods by which you can check whether a link is dofollow or nofollow.

1. From Source Code of a Page:

There is a simple method to check whether a link is do follow or no follow.

Let us take an example,  

Now we need to test whether hyperlink on Instagram.com is nofollow or dofollow in a post High PR Photo Sharing Sites List.

Step 1: Open Page source by clicking Ctrl+U or Click Right on mouse and click on View Page Source.

Step 2: Analyze the HTML code of the page find the anchor text which you want to check ie Instagram.com in our Case.

Lets check for “ Instagram.com” in this post.

Step 3: Find the phrase Instagram.com and see the link. Here you can see the nofollow attribute which states that this link is nofollow.

In case of do follow link the rel attribute must be empty or written with dofollow in the anchor tag.

Here you can clearly See the “no follow attribute”and hence the link here is no follow.

With Moz Toolbar Moz toolbar is awesome tool if you did not know any single line of code.  Let me show you how you can use Moz toolbar to check whether a link is dofollow or nofollow. Moz Bar is available for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Install Moz Toolbar for Chrome here

Install Moz Toolbar for Firefox here

In the toolbar there is is an icon of “Highlight Text or Link” . Click on this and you will  get the following options

No Highlight

Followed (Green)

Nor Followed (Pink)

Internal Links (Orange)

External Links (Blue)

Keyword Highlight (Yellow)

To check whether link is dofollow you must Click on Followed (Green). All the do follow links will be highlighted green. See the Image to get a note how do follow links look like.

Now if you want too to check whether links in the pages are nofollow. Click on Nor Followed (Pink). It will highlight all the nofollow links in Pink color. Here you can see Instagram.com  and Pinterest.com are highlighted pink and it denotes it is a nofollow backlink.

You can use other features of the toolbar like Page Authority, Domain Authority and many other.

Hover Nofollow Hover Nofollow is another tool by which you can know the difference between no follow and do follow backlinks. This is an extension for Mozilla Firefox only. Here is the download link of Hover Nofollow .

How Hover Nofollow works?

Whenever you hover on any hyperlink. It highlights it in two colours Red or Green.

Green colour highlight tells us about the do follow backlinks.

 and Red color highlight represents no follow links .

 It is a great tool to check how to differentiate between dofollow and nofollow backlink.

I hope you have well understood the concept of Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks from this post. If you still have doubts then comment box is open for you. I ll get back to you within 24 hours. 

Abhishek Jain

Abhishek is an SEO Expert with extensive 7+ years of experience. He helps businesses to build their brand and get leads through the Internet without spending anything on Facebook and anything on Google.