Dofollow Backlinks Quickly Impact Search Rankings

Credit: Markus Spiske, Unsplash

Dofollow backlinks have at times a murky impact on site rankings in search engines. Other times, the impact is more clear.

This site recently received an important dofollow link from a large, fairly important and highly relevant website. The link revealed a few interesting insights.

The link led to an obvious increase in traffic from search engines, which means that relevant pages gained higher rankings in search results. The authority and dominance of the linking site was a major benefit.

Over the years, this site has received a variety of backlinks that did not result in any large and immediate jump in search engine visits. Instead, site traffic has steadily grown in nice increments over the years.

The site audience is still modest because the site isn’t that big, nor is it updated more than a few times a week. The new link is a different story.

What is a Dofollow Link?

When Site A links to Site B, Site A has the option of making the link either dofollow or nofollow. The code within the link is rel=”dofollow” for the first option and rel=”nofollow” for the second. An example of the entire code is DuckDuckGo.

If the link has dofollow in the code, a search engine that finds the link will “follow” the link from the linking page on Site A to the landing page on Site B. If the link has nofollow in the code, the search engine won’t follow the link to Site B.

Search engines assign value to every page on a site. A dofollow link from Site A is a vote in favor of Site B. The dofollow links passes “link juice” from A to B, which actually decreases the value of the page on A and increases the value of B. The ranking of the landing page on B goes up in search engines.

It’s no surprise that site publishers love to get dofollow links. But they have become incredibly hard to get in recent years because many websites make most of their links nofollow. They don’t want to pass link juice from their sites to other sites and risk losing search rankings.

What is the Impact of a Dofollow Link?

The impact of dofollow backlinks in search engines depends on three factors:

1. The importance, authority and relevance of the linking site.
2. The importance, authority and relevance of the linking page.
3. The landing page of the site getting the link.

In the example above, the link went from a site with high importance, authority and relevance to the home page of this site.

Because the link went to the home page instead of an inside page, it lifted the ranking value of the entire site. As a result, many pages had increased search engine visits. So far this month, site traffic increased more than 60 percent over the same period a year ago.

Nothing else changed from the time that the link appeared until the traffic jumped, which was a period of about two weeks.

Keep in mind that other dofollow backlinks may not have the same impact. The links may come from less important sites or less relevant pages. They may go to landing pages inside a site rather than the home page.

Site publishers will find that pursuing dofollow links is often a time-consuming and somewhat fruitless task. Good dofollow links are simply hard to find unless a publisher hires an expensive search engine specialist.

At the least, they should ask for a dofollow link if anyone offers a backlink. Otherwise, they should count themselves as lucky when and if they get any.