What is the Best Dofollow vs Nofollow Ratio? It’s not what you thought

do follow no follow ratioSo What is the Best dofollow vs nofollow Ratio?

I bet, it’s not what you thought.

If you ever wonder how your website can benefit from nofollow links and what should be the dofollow vs nofollow ratio – this post will answer all the questions about your backlink profile.

Just keep reading.

Links to your site = organic traffic

Without the right links, you may not rank in Google’s top 10. And Google’s algorithm has evolved over the years to reward natural, relevant, and authority sites.

There is a great correlation (or relationship) between Google rankings and links. If you see a web page that sits at the #1 position in Google, it probably has a lot of the right links. According to Moz, 99.2% of all top 50 results had at least one external link pointing to the website.

Yes, links connect the dots of the web together. But from the search engine’s viewpoint, not all links are created equal.

In the past, Google created a metric called “PageRank” to calculate link points. These link points come primarily from dofollow links. So we can define dofollow links as links that search spider follows, indexes, and rewards. These links are counted as points because they pass SEO value to a web page and improves its search rankings, page & domain authority, as well as overall search performance.

It’s been a long-standing argument. SEO experts and internet marketing companies want to know what the best dofollow vs nofollow link ratio is.

The truth is there is no best ratio. What works for my site might not yield good results for you.

Fun SEO Fact 😉

Boosting your site’s organic traffic and finding link-building opportunities is hard.

Check Your Backlinks

Get an Instant Insight Into Who Links to Your Site

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

You can simply see how and where your competitors get their backlinks and replicate that.

Learn more here.

What is a nofollow link?

Just so we are on the same page, let’s examine what in fact are nofollow links.

Nofollow links are backlinks that have rel=”nofolow” added in the URL.

In simple terms, nofollow links are links that bring referral traffic to your page but carry almost no value in the eyes of Google.

Nofollow links are comments, tweets, Facebook posts & URL shares of that kind.

How to spot a nofollow link?

When you look at the code it will look exactly like this – <a href=”http://www.linkody.com” rel=”nofollow”>Backlink</a>

You can also download a chrome extension called – NoFollow Chrome Extension. Every time there will be a nofollow link, it will be shown in a red square.

What is a do-follow link?

Do-follow link is exactly the opposite of a nofollow link.

It’s also a lot harder to get.

These kinds of backlinks come from special kind of directories, articles and landing pages. Most of the time they are inserted by a webmaster instead of you. That’s also the reason why it’s so much harder to get one.

Remember, how nofollow links had rel=”nofollow”?

Dofollow links don’t have this rel symbol, which indicates that Google’s spiders can follow it and authority from one site is transferred to another.

How to spot a dofollow link?

The snippet looks like this – <a href=”http://www.linkody.com”>Backlink</a>

Check Your Backlinks

Get an Instant Insight Into Who Links to Your Site

Do follow link is exactly like a nofollow link but without rel=”nofollow” parameter.

*If you are looking for strategies to get dofollow backlinks, have a look here  – 41 strategies to get backlinks.

You need both dofollow and nofollow links

Yes, you can’t enjoy organic traffic from Google if you lack any of these link types. They’re both essential for the long-term success of your site.

The most important thing to remember, though, is that you need a balance on the type of links you get.

On one hand, if all your links are only dofollow, Google and other search engines will view this as manipulative and tag your links as spammy, even if you didn’t do anything fishy.

The danger zone of link profile

In the chart below, you’ll notice that too many links from low-quality sites and too much exact match anchor texts could put you in the danger zone.

link-spam-profile

The difference between dofollow and nofollow links is big – hence, Google views these campaigns as unfriendly to their algorithm and users.

On the other hand, if many of your links are no follow, Google will not penalize your site, but you’ll struggle to rank highly in Google results pages – solely because nofollow links don’t improve search rankings.

According to Matt Cutts:

“in general, we don’t follow nofollow links.”

When links and fresh pages are crawled, Google adds them to its index (a data bank containing billions of saved web pages that are served to users when a search is made).

Pages and links that aren’t in the index will not show up in the search results when a keyword is inputted and searched in Google.

Although there is no right or wrong answer on the best dofollow vs nofollow link ratio, you can learn how other webmasters, companies, and SEOs build balanced links that make Google cheer.

The relevance of your backlinks

What Google is truly concerned is the relevance of your backlinks. Even if the links don’t provide value to your SEO, they just might be valuable to the users.

A link from a referring site that’s not related to your industry or topic may not be useful to people when they click on it.

Check Your Backlinks

Get an Instant Insight Into Who Links to Your Site

It doesn’t matter whether the link is dofollow or nofollow. Thus, this will lead to a high bounce rate, or pogo-sticking if you generate clicks from the search engines.

Where's Waldo Graph

What is a natural link profile?

Google has one agenda:

To rank higher means to offer tremendous value for its users.

When you understand this most important pursuit, you’ll dare to spend adequate time on your content, and craft a masterpiece that people will naturally link to.

Your content, links, approach and the like are all vital when you’re looking to improve your link profile.

Just as user’s profile on Facebook contains their full name, address, country, phone numbers, hobbies, academic information, and more, your link profile serves as a gateway for search engines to make smarter decisions on where to rank your web pages in their organic listings pages.

A link profile is not just backlinks

The average SEO expert will advise you to get the right links if you want to boost your rankings. And it’s true.

Except they’re not telling you what makes a link “good” or bad, and what makes a link natural or manipulative.
matt-cutts-link-building-natural

A natural link profile is made up of:
  • The types of links pointing to your site (sources such as blogs, static sites, directories, forums, news articles, press releases, social, etc.).
  • Link velocity: how these links were acquired (all at once, or slowly/steadily over time) in the first place.
  • The anchor text distribution (words used) distribution used in those links (this is an integral part of what makes up a link profile).

Now that you know what a link profile is, another question is, what makes it “natural?”

Natural link profile

The word “natural” is not strange to us. It means existing in or formed by nature. And not made or caused by man, as illustrated below:
natural define

So Google wants to index links that look natural, as though you didn’t ask, request or did anything to get it.

The link profile is more important than you think. Google algorithm updates have leveled the playing ground for both professionals and newbie site owners and SEOs.

Google penalties don’t look at faces before it works. You’ve got to understand that these penalties are largely based on the site’s link profiles.

seo-natural-link-profile

If you want your content pages to perform well in the organic listings pages, you need to work on your link profile.

In modern SEO, where you got your links from is more important than the link itself. Better yet, the quality of a link carries much power than the quantity (or a number of links you generated).

That said, every link is designed to create awareness of something on a different web page. While creating awareness, links offer value and help users find the information they’re desperately seeking for.
manage links

For example, some of the outbound links (out-going links) on this article are relevant.

Because if you click on them, you’ll land on a page that’s closely related to link building or SEO in general. I couldn’t link out to a real estate page, otherwise, it may not be useful to you.

In the same vein, the entirety of your link profile MUST be natural, relevant, and in one way or more help the users, not just boost rankings.

If you’re more concerned about rankings, then you’re probably doing something odd – and Google doesn’t like it.

What makes a good link profile?

Several things affect a link profile. Taking a look at the deeper complexity of a link is vital because it gives you an unfair advantage over your competitors whose focus is on the number of links they can get.

A healthy link profile consists of a lot of high authority links that are pointing to your site and no spammy links.

The breakdown of a good link profile is:
  • It must contain lots of relevant, high authority, and high-value backlinks
  • zero spammy links

In the Moz’s list of Google ranking factors, you find that domain-level link features and page-level link features are the two most important factor that influences organic listings.

 ranking factors

Domain-level link features

This can be defined as the total number of incoming links to a domain as a whole, and their characteristics (e.g., IP address diversifications, domain extensions, domain age).

Domain-level link features matter because it gives credence to your link profile. If the domains that sent links to your site are not authoritative or aged, your link profile will possibly not enhance your rankings.

I’m sure you don’t want that to happen. Or do you?

How to analyze your link profile?

Analyzing your link portfolio helps to determine the authority of domains linking to your site. Therefore, you will need to sign up for a backlink monitoring tool.

Step #1: Quick Signup to Linkody

You can use Linkody to conduct a quick backlinks analysis. Once we know the number of backlinks, and the number of unique domains, we’re set to go.

Linkody Signup

Step #2: Check the backlink data

At a glance, you can see that the site contentmarketingup.com has generated 646 total backlinks.

Linkody Dashboard1

Step #3: Linkody also shows you the Domain Authority (DA) and the Spam Score

Moreover, when you head over to the Analytics section you can see how many Spammy links you have in total.

  • Spam score above 0, should be corrected – it shows (scale 0 – 10) the risk of being penalized (the higher the score, the higher the risk).
  • DA predicts how well your site will rank (scale 0 – 100) on the search engines. 

Spam Score Linkody Analytics

Step #4: The links that link to your site

Then from the “Dashboard” head over to the “Link” section. Over there you will see all your backlinks and their metrics.
Linkody Metrics2

Now you will see the Domain Authority and the Spam Score of sites linking to you

This is so important, because when you’re armed with this, you’ll be able to focus on the right sites and develop a high-quality inbound link profile.

Step #5: Disavow the bad links

You can see that there are some sites to “disavow” – let Google know that it should not look at them. Linkody offers this feature.Linkody Disavow tool

It’s possible that someone else is trying to get them into trouble by deploying a negative SEO campaign. Checking your link profile once in a while is a must to know where your dofollow and nofollow URLs are coming from.

Strong backlink profile

More than anything, you’ve got to develop a strong foundation for your links. You have to make sure high-quality sites link to your website.

But how?

blogs

Reach out to the authority blogs and connect with them at a personal level – pitch a guest post. Fresh high-quality content for them – a backlink for you. It’s a win-win.

After all, they got to the first page of Google and currently ranks highly for several long-tail keywords by constantly publishing fresh, relevant, in-depth, and long-form content. They need to continue or lose their rankings.

When you guest post and the site has a good Domain Authority, even if the link contains a nofollow tag, it’s not useless. Don’t consider it a waste of time.

Note: Make it clear that you want a dofollow link.

You can also reach out to trade associations, local Chambers of Commerce, Educational blogs, Government owned portals, Better Business Bureau, business.com and other “authoritative” directories and websites.

Their domain names usually contain strong backlinks that are aged. Google favors these high-value domain names. By linking from them, you increase the quality score of your link profile and take your rankings to another level.

In all of these, remember to use your company name (or brand name) as the anchor texts for links (more on this later).

When you head over to the “Analytics” section @Linkody.com you will see the distribution of your Anchor texts.Linkody Anchor Texts

This is critical because over-optimized anchor texts can harm your site, and pass negative signals to your link profile, making them look manipulative, instead of natural.

I believe you know that useful content is the key. Great content will continue to grow leads, increase traffic, rankings, and grow revenue.

Whether your site is new or not, it’s important to create great content that is link worthy, says link building expert David McBee.

Fun SEO Fact 😉

Having a strong backlink profile can significantly improve your rankings on Google.

And, of course, organic traffic.
seo fun fact tip1
What’s more, the more competitors you have the more backlinks they can help you to find.
Fun fact tip 2Competitors can help you in many different ways:

  • to find guest blogging opportunities,
  • influencers to review your product/service
  • roundups where to participate
  • links to your content

Wondering how?

It’s actually super simple – here’s everything you need to know.

Don’t be aggressive when building your dofollow & nofollow profile

One of the things that Google considers is the frequency that you get your links. Aggressive link building could harm your site especially if your site is fairly new. When you work on your dofolow vs nofollow ratio, you should follow a pattern and avoid being aggressive.

Trustworthy sites like Amazon, eBay, and the like have the authority to do aggressive linking and get away with it. But you shouldn’t.

The case study of Home Depot’s link profile

A controversial email went out from Home Depot. The folks behind this huge e-commerce shopping site were asking their partners to link to the Home Depot’s website. A copy of this email is right here.

home depot

The resultant effect was that Home Depot saw an increase in its ranking when partners and fans started linking to them.

This might seem manipulative because it’s against Google’s policy, but it helped the site. And they got away with this act at the time, because of the trust flow the pages have.

But a new site that tries this may not live to tell the sad story of Google penalty.

A basic backlink analysis shows that Home Depot’s link profile has a balance between dofollow and nofollow links.

Of course, the management may not have considered this, but it’s always good to know where you stand in the SEO world.
Linkody link profile

Most SEO experts are still confused on what is the right ratio. 

In a way, Google has made it easy. In the sense that if you get paid links, you need to add a nofollow tag to tell Google bot to ignore the links, and not index them.

If you don’t use a nofollow tag, and Google eventually finds out you purchased the links, you stand the risk of a penalty.

According to Francois Goube, “an ideal link profile has do follow and no follow backlinks. It’s just “natural”.”

In other words, both dofollow and nofollow URLs will be present in your link profile if you have been following link building best practices, especially when you focus on creating link-worthy content. This type of content can go viral when you promote them effectively.

promote

Dofollow vs Nofollow ratio

“You should be working towards earning links not begging for it,” says Michael Martinez. That way, you’ll possibly get a natural link profile.

While responding to a Quora question regarding the importance of a good dofollow vs nofollow ratio – I noticed Rav Smith, who says that a 50/50 ratio for dofollow vs nofollow link ratio is natural.

50

However, the truth is that it’s very difficult, perhaps impossible to get a 50/50 ratio. What I think is that the dofollow vs nofollow ratio should be tiny. Say follow links (60%), and nofollow links (40%).

Dofollow links should always surpass nofollow links. Because the former is more important to search engines and are responsible for improving your search rankings, but the latter (no follow links) have their fate spelled out already by Google:
links

Anchor text distribution for links

We can’t talk about the best dofollow vs nofollow ratio without mentioning anchor texts. Anchor texts are the lifeblood of any link. As noted in this description by Stanford University:

“First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves.”

SEO is a multi-faceted subject. Links alone will not get you the rankings you seek, neither will content, no matter how good.

Don’t approach SEO with a half-baked approach. Remember there is a correlation between page-level & anchor text-based links.

data

The relevance of a link is usually determined by the content of the page and the anchor text.

The caveat behind anchor text usage is simple: if you used “social media tools” as your anchor text, what do you intend to achieve?

Obviously, you want people to click on the link and access tools that will enhance their social media marketing. Is that right?

When it comes to anchor text links, you have to simplify the process, and not stuff a web page with several outbound links that go out to the same site.

You’ve got to understand that when Google sees more than one anchor text that links out to the same web page, it takes into account only the first anchor. A second link will be ignored.

ignoredUnfortunately, many people don’t know this. Yes, the anchor text is supposed to speak the same language as the referred site.

In other words, if the anchor text is “social media tools,” the landing page doesn’t have to be “how to get twitter followers” or “get more leads from Instagram.”

The content of your anchor text profile

Google has not set rules on what the anchor text must say.

In order to successfully build a natural link profile, you need to pay more attention to your brand names and use them as anchor texts.

Because Google penguin was released to penalize exact keyword match anchor texts Or rather over-optimized exact match keyword anchor texts). So be careful how you use your keywords in anchors, and instead use your brand name.

Some of the respected SEO professionals have a wide range of anchor text distribution. Interestingly, distributions that are friendly with modern SEO is hinged on brand names. Take a look at Backlinko’s anchor texts distribution:
backlinko

Brian Dean builds a lot of links, not only for his blog but for his clients. And they’re seeing good results in terms of search rankings, link acquisitions, organic traffic, and revenue growth.

His anchor texts are distributed evenly. But more emphasis is placed on his personal brand name (e.g. brian @backlinko, brian dean’s backlink, brian dean).

Anchor text distribution

In like manner, you want your anchor texts to be as natural, and evenly distributed as possible. Here’s what majority of SEO agencies, professionals, and webmaster recommend as the ideal anchor text distribution:

I) Branded – In this case, your brand is included in the anchor text (e.g., our dodocase wallet, quicksprout).

II) Brand Name – The brand name is mostly the anchor text, e.g. Backlinko’s SEO

III) Keyword Branded – Sometimes, to see the results, you have to combine an anchor text with a keyword(exact/phrase/partial match) and the Brand Name, e.g. the best SEO articles from Brian Dean at Backlinko

IV) Exact Match – Use your exact keyword as an anchor to pass the relevant value to your link, e.g. SEO expert NY.

V) Phrase – The anchor text is made up of a keyword phrase or partial match anchor text, e.g. the Brian’s SEO That Works.

VI) Generic – Don’t use any keyword or brand in your anchor text, e.g. visit the site. You could also use just your URL as anchor text, e.g. http://marketingprofs.com

Make sure to avoid unnatural link profile penalty

A lot of things can trigger the manual penalty. You may not control your links 100%, but the ones you can, do your best to get natural links – if you can earn it that would be better.

Links from article directories (or content mill sites) and paid links are classified as manipulative by Google.

In fact, Google wants you to report paid links when you find one. This tells you that Google doesn’t want it.

For this single act, in 2012, Google de-indexed a search agency, Iacquire, for buying links for clients. Obviously, it was the sites the benefitted from the links that suffered a penalty, but the agency. I’m thinking that this was a manual penalty, not automated.

iacquire-google-ban-600x340
Several other sites were awarded the penalty for over-optimization or issues related to unhealthy link profiles.

This wasn’t a case of dofollow vs nofollow ratio, but a question of how natural the links were. There are 17 types of link spams to avoid if you want to steer clear of Google penalty and build a natural link profile.

Dofollow vs nofollow ratio wrapped up

There you have it. An in-depth analysis of links, and how to build balanced do follow vs nofollow ratio – thus, building a natural link profile that will impact your search rankings.

The right dofollow vs nofollow ratio is unknown. Google hasn’t announced the ideal ratio and I don’t think they will ever do that.

Both backlinks have their advantages no matter if it’s an indexable link (dofollow) or a link that just sits there collecting the dust and isn’t followed by Google’s spiders (nofollow). The first contributes to your ranking the later gives you visibility, even if small. 

So, what is your dofollow vs nofollow link ratio?

Find out here!

102 thoughts on “What is the Best Dofollow vs Nofollow Ratio? It’s not what you thought

  1. Do you think Social Shares make for good nofollow links? And if social shares are high, then your nofollow links ratio is going to be higher than dofollow links… would that impact SEO rankings?

    1. Although nofollow links are supposed to not influence ranking, the general consensus is that social signals have a positive impact on ranking. And having a lot of nofollow links will give you more leeway to get after follow link.

    2. Yes it would impact SEO. Google changed it’s new rules that all nofollow links will consider as do follow.

      1. That’s not true…please don’t spread “fake news”. No-follow backlinks are still (almost) worthless.

        1. you can’t say that No-follow links are almost worthless. No-follow links helps to get traffic to your sites.

          1. If the host website has a considerable amount of traffic – some people will stumble through and visit your page but this won’t help site’s rankings. That’s true – thanks for the clarification 😉

  2. Let’s say I post a blog article on Tumblr or blogger.com and within this article, I use a few anchor text links pointing back to different pages on my website. Are these anchor text links dofollow or nofollow?

    1. Norman, you can see if links are follow or nofollow with our tool Linkody. You can also install a plugin, like the NoFollow extension for Chrome to quickly see all the nofollow links from a page.

    2. It will be dofollow and it can help you in ranking, but the microsite must be of quality content. Microblogs are easy source of backlinks with high domain authorities.

  3. It is one of the best content about link building that i have ever read. Thank a lot for the detailed post.

  4. I know about that comment spammers come in three types:
    1. Do Follow Camp – Your spam is only worthwhile if the link is followed. They like to tell you that your comment is the best they’ve read, thank you, and maybe even put a naked url in hopes someone will click on it.
    2. No Follow Can Be Valuable Camp – Your spam is worthwhile if it is a website/blog content related to your link. (See any blog posts by WordStream that targets the livelihood of black hat social services and you’ll see these comments). They believe Google counts nofollow links, and like the do follow camp, will leave naked urls in hope for visitors.
    3. Sock Puppeteer – This person doesn’t care about follow or nofollow, but are keen to create a bad reputation for your website by either impersonating your brand or impersonating a 3rd party that has something bad to say about your brand.

  5. Hi,

    You have made this post really helpful, a lot of research has been included. If we sum up all things together a webmaster should keep the balance between nofollow and dofollow links.

  6. There is no specific ratio set for the DoFollow and NoFollow links. All Google needs is your links should be natural. If everything is natural, the ratio will be also excellent.

  7. Some webmaster may disable the nofollow attribute as a reward for blog commenters who are contributing to the blogging community or online discussion, but that’s up to individual discretion.

  8. Thanks @François for this grate article. as per my opinion 30-70 ratio follow-nofollow is best. Anyway, having no-follow backlinks won’t harm your SEO, an ideal link profile has follow and nofollow backlinks. It’s just “natural”.

  9. what a great post on backlinks dofollow vs nofollow links there was alot of good information that you had on this topic. Keep up the good work and keep making great content for everyone to learn from you. Thanks again.

  10. Francois, this is a great piece of work you put here and I can’t believe how much information you have put here to clear things up as I was looking for what makes good links to boost the PA and DA metrics for a website. Great work and thanks for the hard work you shared with us all. Thanks Kindly

  11. Francois, this is an amazing article that you are providing here. I really like it, it helps me a lot to clarify many things about do-follow & no-follow.Keep the good work up, I will stay connected to your blog for the future posts.

  12. Hi Michael,

    First of all thanks for sharing such great piece of content. Secondly, can you please show me the exact ratio of dofollow and nofollow backlinks? like how many nofollow backlinks should i create for 1 dofollow backlink?

    Best Regards
    Matthew

    1. A great piece of information shared on this post, I really appreciate it. I have a question in my mind.
      the question is, “For one dofollow backlink how many nofollow links should be created?”
      Please help me finding the answer I would appreciate the positive response.

  13. Francois, this a great article. However, I have come across a website recently which has 99% no-follow backlinks and still it outranks most of its competition. So, I’m starting to think that no-follow backlinks aren’t too bad either.

      1. Hi Francois,

        Even I felt that no-follow links don’t carry any weight in their ranking algorithm until I came across that website. Having a healthy combination of both do-follow and no-follow links is probably the right approach.

        -Avishek

  14. ‘Nofollow’ links can be easy to achieve. Yet, you will find many blogs, online magazines and news channels will want payment for a ‘Follow link’. This goes against Googles guidelines. Don’t ever pay for a link. This causes a dilemma. I find you have to work hard at producing great content that people will find and link to naturally. Press release information also helps in gaining good links. Try and get yourself established on some high ranking magazines and blogs as an author. This can also help. Good Luck.

  15. Outstanding post! I did not realize Google only counts the first anchor text on the page. Also, your anchor text example of Backlinko really shows the importance of branding your website and using obvious money keywords in excess.

  16. hello admin thanks for the beautiful article. now I understand the seo link juice. thanks once again.

  17. I have come across a website recently which has 99% dofollow backlinks and still it outranks most of its competition.

  18. I don’t feel that there is a certain percentage of dofollow or nofollow link. Better to have a good quality content that make your site get a lower bounce rate and continuous update of your site.

  19. Awesome posts,

    I can add also by experience that when I see a site with lover number of links ranking on first page with almost all other sites with a quite bugger number of links, it is when the site with low number of links has 20% – 40% of no follow links. Well in last time Google made it also official that the importance of no follow links is growing and we will read still a lot about this topic in times that are coming.

  20. This is the best post on follow vs. nofollow links. It clears up my confusion. And thank you for warning us about not getting paid links. I did not know the danger (penalty) it might pose. I almost purchased links from Fiverr.

  21. Thank you for the great article. Since I have build my website I was looking how to rank it and what is the best for it, do follow back links or no follow back links. Now I got a clear answer.

  22. Links to your site = organic traffic

    Without the right links, you may not rank in Google top 10. And Google’s algorithm has evolved over the years to reward natural, relevant, and authority sites.

    There is a great correlation (or relationship) between Google rankings and links. If you see a web page that sits at the #1 position in Google, it probably has a lot of the right links. According to Moz, 99.2% of all top 50 results had at least one external link pointing to the website.

    Yes, links connect the dots of the web together. But from the search engine’s viewpoint, not all links are created equal.

    In the past, Google created a metric called “PageRank” to calculate link points. These link points come primarily from dofollow links. So we can define dofollow links as links that search spider follows, indexes and rewards. These links are counted as points because they pass SEO value to a web page and improves it search rankings, page authority, and overall search performance.

  23. Thanks for sharing this informative article. It has cleared many confusions coming across in my way while executing link building process.

  24. Well..
    The no follow do matter and the low pagerank too.
    Google is checking if you have natural links.
    If you have only high pagerank links then google punish that site or even can ban from index. A site need a healthy mix of everything because they look if it is manally made or by tools. so mixing everything will get the pagerank higher.

  25. Question: if I add a rel=”nofollow to blog X, can blog X still see the incoming traffic from that link? Also, does it affect the Google Analytics for blog X at all?

    My point: I want blog X to see that I’m driving traffic to them. Will that traffic still be seen in the stats of blog X if I use nofollow?

  26. Awesome guide about do-follow & no-follow links. Yeah, it’s true. Relevancy is the most important factor to rank in Google.

  27. I think do-follow and no-follow both links are good for backlinks profile, btw thanks for explaining very well. I am also a blogger and web developer this article helped me.

  28. There is no golden ratio and there is no hard or fast rule. Its all about brand and popularity. The old saying… ‘If you build it, they will come’ does not apply to page rank. The new saying… ‘if you build it, it has to stand out head and shoulders above the competition’

  29. Very good article.

    Backlinks influencing SEO is something that has to disappear, and hopefully they are less and less relevant for Google in the future. Backlinks are manipulated in a lot of ways, specially having a bigger budget.

    Links are supposed to naturally come when your content is good. That is a cool story for childs, but natural link building is not happening if you are not ranking very high, which happens only when you have a very good backlink list. This makes no sense at all and hopefully in the future we will see Google caring only about on page SEO and user experience.

    Still very good content, because nothing of this is happening within the next years.

  30. thanks for the helpful article, helped me a lot understanding the practice with search engine optimization.

  31. I have a question please.. my domain is about 2 months old and before landing this your article I have upto 5k backlinks last time I checked and it was indicating that I have only 15℅ dofollow links and that has drastically demote my ranking and now on my dashboard I see search texts as my post URLs not any keywords. Please does this mean my site is facing a penalty??

    1. I saw this behavior, sometimes a brand new site gets a temporary small spike in traffic. Maybe this is a way for Google to get some first CTR metrics.

  32. Thank you for sharing and clear our doubts about Follow and no Follow.
    Great job! again thanks a lot for sharing this valuable and informative blog.
    Nice work! keep writing and sharing with us.

    1. I am glad you like it and I hope this guide helps in building the perfect backlink profile 😉

  33. Great resource of SEO to optimize serp results. I am going to implement these hacks on my blog.

  34. I started copying the ratio of my strongest competitor. I hope it’ll work.
    Thank you for the article.

    1. Note: it’s not that important to copy the exact ratio of your competitors but to make sure your ratio is in the OK-zone – you need to make sure that there are NOT only do-follow OR only no-follow backlinks. A healthy link profile is when your site has majority do-follow backlinks and some no-follow backlinks (most of the time 10-20%).

  35. Great post, very informative. I wonder why the other experts of this sector don’t notice this. You should continue your writing. I’m sure, you’ve a great readers’ base already!

  36. Hey this is a great information shared about SEO improvements everyone must make. I also believe – the dofollow and nofollow ratio is important. It is a great post I appreciate the effort. Keep up the good work!

  37. The problem with testing it is that you need nofollows from great sites – Wikipedia is just one example – and you can’t really get those without earning follow links as well. Still, my guess is that a link from a Wikipedia article will boost rankings.

  38. Wow. This post helped me a lot in my work. I am very appreciated to the admin. Thank you

  39. Wonderful, thanks for sharing this article. Whenever I make back-links, I just use do follow and no follow mix without focusing on the ratio.

  40. Many are obsessed with do follow blogs, im not saying that this is useless since it give you links but comments should be used holistically within a masterplan for getting what you really need: direct link recommendations from bloggers or site owners with a loyal audience, sending you high quality visitors that will convert well.

  41. Thank you for Explaining about Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks. Your blog is very helpful.

  42. I applied these tips on one of my recent blog and it helped to get better results within shorter period of time.

  43. Carry on the good work. This is a great post. Your selection of the topic is very good and also well written. Thanks for sharing.

  44. Excellent blog I visit this blog it’s really awesome. Blog content written clearly and understandable. The content of information is very informative.

  45. Nice Explanation about Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks. Your blog post is helpful.

  46. Does a huge number of no-follow links from relevant websites help in search engine ranking? Or a healthy do-follow and no-follow ratio is must every time to rank a post?

    1. Later is more important. 80:20 rule in life and also in backlinks is a good one to follow. Thus, keep the do-follow higher than no-follow links.

  47. We tested a lot of cases and our conclusion is that a minimum of 30% nofollow backlinks has great results, but its still depending of the market where you are operating. Look at competitor averages 😉

  48. Really Nice Blog – Its content is clearly readable and thanks for sharing with us. Keep Posting

  49. Does bookmarking and tags help increase ranking as most bookmarkings urls are no follow?

    Thanks for sharing and I like how you have explained in detail about the links.

    1. Hi, Caahil! Google has devalued the significance of bookmark links. Thus, they provide little to no increase in your ranking. However, you can still increase your traffic if the no-follow links are placed on a website with high traffic.

  50. I think best ratio is “balanced ratio”, 60/40 should be a Goal. 60% Nofollow and 40% for Dofollow.

  51. Great case study that goes over and above explaining dofollow and nofollow links. This is a good starting point for beginners and refresher for more advanced individuals.

    1. It’s great to hear that you found our article useful. Wish you the best success with your link strategy!

  52. Nice Explanation about Dofollow and Nofollow Backlinks. Your blog post is helpful.

  53. When I start the blogging I was confused now I clear that and it’s working for the thanks’s

  54. Hi, I searched the topic about do follow and no follow and came across your blog article. It is an interesting and informative read. I like it because its easy to understand. You explained it step by step.

  55. so thanks for share such knowledgeable things this helps me very much to clear the confusion about follow and no follow ratio

    1. Hi Raisaleem!

      It’s great that you found some answers in this article.

  56. Hi everyone,
    I am working for a company in Viet Nam. I am a SEOer, but I don’t have much experience about this job. Your writing will give me some useful information, I can improve my job in the future.

  57. Very nice article. no follow links now may be followed by google. This was changed this year.

  58. I am a SEOer, so I want to learn about follow and nofollow ratio.
    I think it’s very useful for my job in the future.
    Thank you so much

  59. Hey,
    Thank you for sharing your article. It is really amazing for me. Keep continuing sharing your blog post. Thank you very much.

  60. Well i really dont care about the ratio. What only matters for me is relevancy.

    if the link is coming from a relevant site it is acceptable for me either follow or no-follow

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