dofollow or nofollow? What is the difference and benefits?

One method of getting additional traffic to your website is adding a link back to your webiste when posting on other people blogs, but some of these sites operate using nofollow links and others use dofollow links but what’s the difference?

Essentially these methods are for search engines only and they do exactly what they say. 

NoFollow means:-

• that the search engines do not follow the link through to your website
• that the link does not count as a backlink

DoFollow means:-

• that the search engines are allowed to continue through to your website
• that the link does count as a backlink.

So why post on blogs which use nofollow?  From my research on this there are 2 main reasons to post in blogs which use nofollow:-

1. Human visitors don’t just visit blogs using dofollow so you can still receive human traffic from nofollow blogs.
2. If all your traffic comes from dofollow backlinks then search engines may interpret this as artificially generated traffic for the sake to receiving higher rankings and for websites with good content then natural traffic should be part of the balance.

We have decided to operate a dofollow policy because at then end of the day we wish to receive additional traffic from other peoples blogs and we believe that we should give our readers the same opportunity from our site.  In addtion to this we have decided to implement CommentLuv to provide our readers with a link to your latest blog post within any comments you make.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.