What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow?

[AndrewASmith]

Is PR the only difference? Will Googlebot still follow and index pages with nofollow? Does google it count as a backlink?

 

[John Doe]

Googlebot will maybe follow and even index, but links with "nofollow" attribute are considered as sign of distrust and Google doesn`t count them as backlinks.

 

[Damion]

It's not a sign of distrust.

The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

 

[whitebark]

yahoo and msn also treat nofollow differently from google.

 

[MrCat]

Is PR the only difference? Will Googlebot still follow and index pages with nofollow? Does google it count as a backlink?

I think I happened to answered this same post at http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/79514-what-difference-between-dofollow-nofollow.html#post799616

I'll paste my answer on this here as well :D

Dofollow - allows the site to pass PR on an outgoing link, thus counting as a vote for the quality of the site in the eyes of google

Nofollow - sends signal to the bot that the link is not vouched for so no PR is passed on. Even with a link being "nofollow", the bot still recognizes the link as valid.

 

[Hafsoh]

No follow is just like a command to say don't pass page rank, but Google will count link on nofollow.

 

[Saige]

"Nofollow" prevents link juice from passing, thus no page rank is passed...

 

[shaelheart]

Most social bookmark sites are nofollow. Example is del.icio.us and stumble upon. Nofollow will only affect PR rank but there are still many debates over this issue.

 

[natalie1981]

yahoo and msn also treat nofollow differently from google.

I agree. I actually read about this but I forgot where. Google totally ignores nofollow links but yahoo and msn (though not really sure about msn), will index nofollow links but then wouldn't give the nofollowed link much authority.

 

[shockie]

Google totally ignores nofollow links but yahoo and msn (though not really sure about msn), will index nofollow links but then wouldn't give the nofollowed link much authority.

google does not "totally ignore" nofollow links and will still index nofollow links - they just don't pass any link juice.

 

[seotogo]

Some Wordpress bloggers are now using dofollow plugins to pass PR to frequent posters, thus building their online communities.

 

[directory_master]

nofollow doesn't pass pr.....but that is only in google, it does not mean anything for yahoo or msn , so if you want to rank high for the last two...the more links the better.

 

[shockie]

it does not mean anything for yahoo or msn.

this is wrong afaik.

 

[himanuzo]

If you see the "nofollow", you need to leave it because it is useless for SEO purposes.

 

[rafaelrls]

all sites should make dofollow

 

[adda4u]

Can any give full details abt nofollow

 

[weblord]

yes the protect the pr from passing to the site. yes googlebot will index the site even if it's a nofollow. yes it's also considered a backlink.

Is PR the only difference? Will Googlebot still follow and index pages with nofollow? Does google it count as a backlink?

 

[rafaelrls]

dofollow google passes some juice of pagerank. Nofollow not

 

[Keral_Patel]

Nofollow links are followed by crawlers and the pages are also indexed. No distrust or anything only thing I read was that there is no vote from the link giving page to the linked page.