One of my readers, Caleb, asked about the benefits and differences of nofollow and dofollow links for Internet marketing.

Overal, dofollow is obviously the best type of backlink because it passes link juice from one site to another and counts the anchor text for keyword relevance, but, do not discount the nofollow completely!

The original meaning of the nofollow attribute as created by Google means:

• Not follow through to that page to crawl its content
• Not count the link in calculating Page Rank.
• Not count the anchor text in determining what keywords the page being linked to is relevant for.

Now, this basically means that the nofollow tag in backlinks will not pass any link juice to your website or blog, will not help to index your site, nor will the content of the page you are linking to be crawled, as a result of being found on that page where the nofollow link is, nor will any relevancy be given to your website for the keywords used in the anchor.

Do all the search engines treat nofollow the same way?

Google emphatically states, as the creator of the nofollow tag that, the nofollow attribute complies will all the characteristics stated above. No crawl of content, no link juice passed, no keyword relevancy and no index as a result of that backlink. Google simply does not follow the link at all!

Yahoo says, that “If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a ‘no follow’ attribute or not. However, if the ‘no follow’ attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link.”

This means Yahoo will crawl and will index the content, but will not pass link juice.

MSN Live stated they are on board with all the parameters of the nofollow attribute as stated above.

Ask.com, completely ignores the nofollow

Is what they say truth or fiction? Well, if you do some research around the blogosphere, (with the exception of Ask) you will find conflicting results, as some have tested and found results that contradict these statements by Yahoo and Google. In fact, many believe that Google sometimes does follow the nofollow links, and that Yahoo ignores the nofollow all together. Is this true, possibly, but it in reality it doesn’t matter! Do I care? No! Will I spend my valuable time doing this research? No! Because I’d rather spend it building links.

In essence you want to have both types of links because:

1. Only getting do-follow links will look un-natural and could cause alarms to go off. When building links you want to look as natural as possible and get a variety of links from all types of sources.

2. Getting a high Page Rank nofollow link is better than no link at all.

3. All types of links can bring traffic, not the best buying kind, but good for subscibers, as from compelling comments on related blogs. Just as Caroline Middlebrook, she built a lot of her 4,000 + subscribers with a sound blog comment strategy.

4. If you focus all your time on researching where to get do-follow, you lose the valuable time to just build links, all kinds, all types.

5. Yahoo, though they say will not pass link juice or keyword relevance, still crawls and indexes websites from a nofollow link. And, ASK ignores it completely.

6. The SE’s can possibly lie, what a shocker

7. Many nofollow links are delivered with Google Alerts all the time, this is not earth shattering, but it tells me that Google is aware of those links. With some authority sites, like the socials, I can add a link and literally 1 hour later I get a Google Alert.

I have lots of nofollow links, some natural and some manual. But I never spend more than 5 minutes getting those manually. For example, a site offers me to build a mini site with my content and I can link back to my sites and the links are nofollow, I will pass because the time investment to build a mini site full of content is way more energy than I wish to spend for nofollow links. But, with Squidoo and Hub pages for example, the links are do-follow so the time is definitely worth it.

For article marketing, nofollow links have benefits as well, as some article sites are nofollow, but they are high PR, and other webmasters go there to get content to republish on their sites and this leads to getting more dofollow links from that article going viral.

So the lesson here people is just get links

Of all the backlinks you can get the most powerful are within content backlinks, with keyword anchor text on keyword rich related pages, and if they are one-way than that’s the ultimate backlink. Yes, these are stronger than sidebar/blogroll, top commenter and blog comments.

A within content link is basically when another site or blog backlinks to you with your anchor text within written content on one of their inner website pages or blog posts and of course the content needs to be related to your keyword.

Sometimes you can get these backlinks naturally when other blogs and sites link to you, that is great, but often the anchor is off because they guess at it and in reality effective link building is mostly manual and you have to find people who will give you quality backlinks and not lame links pages, or reciprocals as most webmasters want to do.

I am going to refer you to the ultimate resource for these types of backlinks.

Connect Content

1. The members understand how to build links, they know what their doing, and you will get one-way, within content keyword anchor links on keyword related/optimized pages.

2. You can check out the sites that you will link to and that are linking to you and no, you will not get a thousand links at once and set off any alarms!

Basically, you set up your anchor links for other members to choose from and they do the same, no limits! You give links and you get links, period.

All links are validated and tracked by the website so no checking required and you can view them yourself from your dashboard and by going to the site itself.

Everything is done manually by the members, including the choosing, no footprint, no lame codes or automated links whatsoever, it is basically just a place to find like minded site owners who have a common goal (we all know what that is).

Connect Content is only $12 a month, believe me it is the best $12 you will ever spend, the cost is there to keep it a private place and keep the idiots, hater competitors, scammers and spammers out. Right now there are a lot of members, but we need more so that we may all reach our goals.

I am not going to say more than this for obvious reasons, suffice it to say that this is extremely beneficial to all of us bloggers and webmasters and I strongly recommend that you guys go over to Connect Content and sign up, you will not regret it.