How To Check DoFollow And NoFollow Links ?
Whenever we talk about search engines, the first thing that might come to your mind is that links.
Links are those necessary properties of search engines through which search engine crawlers navigate and travel from one website to another website.
And, To traverse to any other external sites, they form the connections through which they traverse and these connections are known as dofollow and nofollow links.
So, If google crawler is crawling your site, that means your links are embedded with dofollow link attribute.
But if it doesn’t crawl your site that simply means that they’re set to work as nofollow links.
And this is important for all webmasters to identify which link is followed & not followed by the search engines.
So, are you ready to learn how to check dofollow and nofollow links.
Now, Let’s take a quick recap for what you will learn in this article.
You will understand-
- What are DoFollow Links?
- Importance of DoFollow Links in SEO.
- What are Nofollow Links?
- Newly Introduced NoFollow Link Attributes.
- When to Use NoFollow Link Atttribute?
- How to Check DoFollow and Nofollow Links?
- When to use Nofollow links on your blogs
Now let’s start and dive deeper to better understand links behavior.
What are DoFollow Links?
By default, all links and hyperlinks available on the web belong to the category of dofollow links unless we made some changes and modifications to them.
From the perspective of Google crawler, DoFollow ( or follow) links are those links that instruct a google crawler to follow those links that don’t have rel= “nofollow” link attribute in their links.
An example of Dofollow Link:
<a href=”http://www.tips.com/”> Follow vs Nofollow Links </a>
Importance of DoFollow Links in SEO
No doubt, DoFollow Links are considered as the quality links for a website in SEO that gives strength to your site but they will also boost your overall link SEO value for your whole site.
Dofollow links are important because these links help to increase your Page rank value.
If the average DA (domain authority) site’s webmaster links back your site to their site with a follow link attribute then this act will add positive value to your site that gives you higher SEO value to your site to increase your page rank.
So, If your site has a dofollow links from high authoritative sites, or we can say that good domain authority value sites, then dude, your site gonna rank high on google because of links juice your site has from high authoritative sites.
Also Read, How to Add NoFollow Tag in WordPress Blog ?
What are NoFollow Links?
Nofollow links are those links that instruct google crawler to not follow and crawl those links that have rel = “nofollow” link attribute.
These nofollow links only followed by your site visitors because Google’s search engine crawler never ever crawls those links that are marked as Nofollow, So always be aware when you’re editing the status of links for the outbound links.
An example of Nofollow Link:
<a href=”http://www.tips.com/” rel=”nofollow”> Follow vs Nofollow Links </a>
Newly Introduced NoFollow Link Attributes
The link attribute describes the nature of links and an important part of links because these attributes define the purpose of the links…
In terms of SEO, these links attribute guide search engines whether to follow a link or not, index or not.
In September 2019, Google introduced 2 sub-link attributes of nofollow attribute used to identify sponsored and UGC links.
That’s why nofollow link attribute popularity is going high every day.
Now, let’s figure out the nature of both links attributes that Google crawler follows when crawling.
rel= “sponsored” Link
This attribute is mostly used for sponsored or paid links that help to let Google know that content behind those links is sponsored and paid.
<a href=”http://www.tips.com/” rel=”sponsored”> Follow vs Nofollow Links </a>
rel= “UGC” Link
UGC link attribute is used for user-generated content. These links are generally found in user comments.
<a href=”http://www.tips.com/” rel=”ugc”> Follow vs Nofollow Links </a>
When to Use Nofollow Link Attribute on Your Blogs
Generally, all webmasters use nofollow links when they don’t want to pass the link juice to another website, that’s why they used nofollow link attribute.
The nofollow attribute is useful whenever we make backlinks for our site and when
- Highly recommended for you when your site has affiliate links.
- You should mark your blog comments as Nofollow links to ignore spam on your site.
- Use them for untrustworthy sources of content.
- Use them for sites that don’t have a good domain authority ( or good quality score).
- Use this nofollow link attribute for all outbound links ( external links ) to maintain the link juice.
Sources That Gives You Nofollow Links
In general, Incoming links from blogs comments and social media platforms links have Nofollow tags in their links that can be only accessible for site visitors but there are some other resources that also give you nofollow links.
Some of them are-
- Wikipedia
- Forums sites ( Quora, Reddit)
- Social media platforms ( Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter )
- Online directories
- Press releases
How to Check DoFollow And NoFollow Links?
There are 2 ways to check the status of your links.
- In the first method, you can manually find your link’s status by checking into the HTML code in your browser.
- In the second method, You can use any chrome extension to check out links.
First Method – Manual Approach
Now, In the manual approach…
To check your individual link whether that is DoFollow or Nofollow, Just follow these simple steps:
- Open a web page in the browser.
- Right-click on the anchor text.
- Click on the inspect.
- In code, you can see a link with its attribute and your link looks like this:
Now, You can easily see from the above screenshot that the link that contains the anchor text “Best WordPress SEO plugins to optimize your website” is DoFollow Link because rel= “nofollow” link attribute is not present here.
Now, let’s check another anchor text and see their result…
You can see that the link that contains anchor text “Sora Ads” is a nofollow link because it has rel = “nofollow” link attribute in their HTML tag.
Or
If you want to check the status of your links on your complete page. Follow these simple steps:
- Just simply right click on your page
- Click on the view page source
- Now press CTRL+F and just type nofollow in the search box,
- Now, here you’ll see all links which are nofollow links.
This simple approach is useful for you if you want to check links status for a single article or a blog on the web.
Second Method –
SEO Chrome Extensions To Check DoFollow And NoFollow Links
Now, if you want to Analyse links status in a bulk then there are countless chrome extensions are available for you to do this task, which will make this task easy for you to do.
You can download it from the chrome web store.
I’ll recommend this secondary method to you to enhance your work productivity by using the browser extension, so that this way you can easily analyze nofollow links without having any additional efforts.
I’ve listed below some chrome extensions that will definitely boost your productivity when analyzing links.
Final Thoughts on How To Check Dofollow And NoFollow Links
Hopefully, this article is helpful for you 😊 to check the status of your link in an easy way.
Personally, I prefer Nofollow chrome extension if I’ve to check the link status of nofollow links on my site and on other’s site which simply means, this plugin will highlight all those links that have nofollow link attribute in their link’s HTML code, On the other hand, dofollow links status will remains natural & same and no changes will occur in their links nature.
Now, Do let me know in the comments section if you still have any doubt regarding how to check dofollow and nofollow links.
If you’re finding this article is useful for you, then share it with your friends.
Happy Learning 
and Thanks for Reading .
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