Can anyone explain "dofollow" & "nofollow" to me?

[QponCutie]

Make sure to speak slowly! LOL Someone suggested i use DoFollow, and gave me a link with info about it, but I'm not understanding the whole thing!

Thanks!

Maureen

[sukosaki]

DoFollow just tells the search engine spider they can follow the link and possibly score your site for it. Some people set it up in hopes of gaining more links.

NoFollow will stop the search engine from following it and will not score the site linked to. You can see why DoFollow is more desirable to the site linked to.


Hope it makes sense.

[Bloggeries]

Check the link below for the definition of nofollow.

nofollow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Links are by default dofollow so unless you add the nofollow it's dofollow by default.

[sukosaki]

yea, like he said

[CountryBoy]

One more point: nofollow is essentially a Google thing (them being the self-proclaimed saviours of the web). Some other search engines disregard it entirely.

[ffnstuff]

perfect question for a blog post, it can be tricky to figure it all out at first.

[April]

This definitely needs to be included in one of those Blogging 101 type things!

[flashgordon]

It looks like DoFollow and NoFollow has been explained. However, from some of my own experiments, I do think Google and the other SEs still follow a NoFollow link, they just don't give it as much weight. So, if a DoFollow link is given a 1, a NoFollow link is given only a .25 (or something). Plus, having some NoFollow links makes your backlinks look more natural.