Dofollow is the opposite of Nofollow. It is used in SEO to indicate to search engine robots that they must take into account a link leaving the page to identify other documents.

Dofollow is used in natural referencing for a link leaving a web page, indicating to the engine that it must take it into account in its analysis.

First case: in a link tag.

Let’s take the example of a web page A that contains a link to page B (the link can be internal or external). In the case below, we say that the link is in « follow » or « dofollow » (it is a classic link, without restrictions):

If we add to this code the attribute, we will then tell the engine that it should not take this link into account (it should not follow it) in the future:

In this case, the engine will follow the other links of the page (those in dofollow) but not the one in .

Note that there is no « follow » or « dofollow » parameter in a link tag. The mention « dofollow » indicates first and foremost the absence of an attribute « ».

Second case: in the meta tag « robots ».

This case is used to indicate to engine robots that they should take into account the outgoing links of the page. We will use here the meta tag « robots », in this form:

or :

The « index » or « noindex » parameter indicates the indexing or de-indexing of the page, the « follow » parameter (unlike « » in this case) will indicate that the robot will follow all links (unless, in the page, some are individually marked in « » as in the first case).

For example, most (if not all) social networks have put their outgoing links in , as have blog comments, forums, Wikipedia, etc. All these sources of information do not provide backlinks to a website, since Google only takes into account dofollow links in its algorithm.

Why are backlinks important in SEO?

What is Netlinking?

What is a Dofollow link?

First case: in a link tag.

Second case: in the meta tag « robots ».