Key Differences between Do Follow and No Follow Links

The difference between do follow and no follow links lies in the command they give to the search engine.

Content marketing is essential for establishing a brand’s presence in the global market, hence the content has to be ranked the highest by the search engine to increase visibility and traffic on the content. While there are many tricks and strategies for optimizing the content for the search engine, backlinks offer many advantages. 

Passing on the authority 

Associations are necessary for building networks in business, backlinks do the same for the content. Associating content with external websites helps in asserting the authenticity of the context of the content. It enables the search engine to recognize the content as authentic, valid, reliable, and up to the minute. The search engine therefore ranks the content high for which it can be found high up in the SERP serving the very purpose of SEO optimization. The backlinks pass on the authority to the other website with the aim of achieving high ranking, visibility and traffic on the content.  Hence, passing on the authority is the main reason behind using backlinks in a content. 

Do follow

A Do follow link does everything written above, it commands the search engine to take the association with the external website as valid and necessary for understanding the content written. The search engine in doing so takes the links into account and ranks the content accordingly. More the associations formed through such links, more easily does the search engine regards the content as necessary and useful for the audience and ranks it high on the SERP. Hence do follow links are important and crucial when it comes to SEO optimization and content marketing.

Benefits of Do-follow Link

From digital marketing perceptive a do follow link provides the most amount of benefits. A Do-follow link generally provides the following benefits,

• To prove the authenticity of the content by associating it with a website trusted by both the viewer and the search engine.
• With the aim of referring the content by associating it with a website that has already been ranked as helpful for the audience. 
• To generate traffic on the website and to make search engine consider the content as the most in demand and useful for the audience.

No follow 

A No follow link does not pass on the authority. As the name suggests, these links are incorporated in content to command the search engine to avoid considering the links to the external website so that it doesn’t take it into account while considering the content’s eligibility to be ranked higher on the SERP. 

No follow is necessary 

Questions may arise about the necessity of the no follow links in the content. Despite not being directly useful in SEO optimization, no follow links are quite useful in content marketing. Commanding the search engine to not consider the external website links can be useful and indispensable in various situations. Even though no follow links do not generate traffic it can help reduce blockages that would otherwise impact the page’s ranking. 

When to use no follow: 

The following are the times when no follow links a digital marketer can seek no follow links.

• When a website a top source of information for a specific niche, even a no-follow link from it carries a lot of weightage.
• When we create al links as do follow links Google may treat them as spam, so to avoid that some SEOs prefer to create some no-follow links as well.

Do follow vs No follow

Parameters	Do follow	No follow
Impact on SEO	direct	indirect
Passing on the authority	yes	no
Reasons for usage	Building traffic, high ranking in SERP	To avoid unrelated websites from being associated with the content To avoid spamming from other external sources
Traffic generation on content	Direct impact, generates traffic and helps in getting high rank for the content	Indirect impact, by cutting off irrelevant links and spams, it protects the content’s ranking by removing the blockages.

Conclusion

The difference between no follow and do follow links is the purpose behind their usage, while do follow links command the search engine to associate websites, no follow links do the opposite but both are important and should be used accordingly. The no follow links are essential, albeit indirectly for the SEO optimization by removing those links that can impact the page’s ranking if the search engine crawls and considers the website while ranking the content.