Dofollow links are links that a website owner endorses or trusts enough to permit their site to freely link to the other site. Search engine spiders will follow these links freely and will count it as a vote. These types of links play a more significant role in boosting your site up search engine rankings.

Likewise, nofollow links are links a webmaster doesn’t trust, doesn’t endorse or is unsure about. Search engine spiders may or may not follow them, but as they are marked with the nofollow attribute they will not usually pass any link value. Consequently, as no link value is passed they will not directly affect how your site ranks.

If you omit building nofollow links on purpose, you are missing out on a huge indirect boost to your rankings. For instance, if your competitor is listed in a niche directory but the link is nofollow, it is foolish to dismiss that link as not helping them outrank you. For all you know, that single link could generate a lot of traffic for your competitor. It may also be a place any bloggers visit to find sites to write about and research in their niche. If a blogger then links to your competitor’s site from their blog with a dofollow link, by not listing your site you could be missing out on free one-way dofollow links.

Bear in mind the majority of link sources available provide nofollow links by default. If you concentrated solely on building dofollow links it would not appear natural. Any successful link building plan will have some nofollow links whether you wanted them or not. This is not a reflection on the quality of your site. It is simply a fact that more and more webmasters are choosing to add the nofollow attribute in the false hope that they will be able to establish their site as the ultimate authority site in a niche.

The important point is your site cannot be penalized in rank for having another site link into it, whether the link is dofollow or nofollow. If your site only had dofollow links pointing to it then it would not appear natural. This could flag the site for a manual review and bring much closer scrutiny to the website in question. A manual inspection could then uncover other things that would lead to your site having a ranking penalty imposed.

In order to safeguard from this possibility, your link building plan should not look to specifically build links from dofollow sites only. Similarly, if you link to other sites from within your site, you need to evaluate which sites are worth linking to freely and which sites you should use the nofollow attribute on.

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