Links to your site = organic traffic
Without the right backlinks, you will definitely not rank in Google top 10. Google’s algorithm has evolved over the years now to reward natural, relevant, and authority sites. Whenever we talk about SEO, some of the common words are no index, index, no follow, do follow, meta robots and so on.
All the words hold equal importance in the book of Search Engine Optimization.
If you see a web page that sits at the #1 position in Google, it probably has a lot of do follow links.
According to Moz, 99.2% of the top 50 results had at least one external link pointing to the website.
Google created a metric called PageRank to calculate the link points or link juice. This link juice flows through different sites and into new sites through hyperlinks. The more reputable the site, the bigger boost of link juice the site gets. Backlink from the New York Times or BBC is pure gold !
NOFOLLOW LINKS
A no follow link does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank, and doesn’t help a page’s placement in the SERPs. Nofollow links get no love. When you look at the code it will look exactly like this –
You can download a chrome extension called – NoFollow Chrome Extension. Every time there is a no follow link, it will be shown in a red square.
DOFOLLOW LINKS
These kinds of backlinks come from special kind of directories, Blogs and landing pages. Dofollow links don’t have this symbol rel & link juice can from one site to another. An example of Dofollow Link:
If the website owner is linking back to you with a no follow attributes, it won't pass any link juice. Only Humans are able to follow those links. Though Google made it clear that they don’t consider no follow link attributes but the weight of such links are really less.
YOU NEED BOTH DO FOLLOW & NO FOLLOW
ALERT - You need a balance on both the type of links Do follow & No follow. On one hand, if all your links are only do follow, Google and other search engines will view this as manipulative action and tag your links as spammy, even if you didn’t do anything Incorrect. But at the same time even having TOO MANY No follow links won't improve your search rankings.
RELEVANCE MATTERS
What Google is truly concerned is that your backlinks should be relevant. Even if the links don’t provide value to your SEO, they should be of value to the users. For Ex - A link from a referring site that’s not related to your topic may not be useful to people when they click on it. No matter whether the link is do follow or no follow. This will lead to a higher bounce rate, or pogo-sticking if you generate clicks from the search engines.
NATURAL LINK PROFILE
Just as any 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 these search engines to make smart decisions on where to rank your website in their organic listings. Google penalties don’t look at faces before it penalizes. You’ve got to understand that these penalties are largely focused on the site’s link profiles.
The link profile is much more important than you think. Google algorithm updates have leveled the playing ground for both professionals and new site owners and SEOs.
A healthy link profile consists of a lot of high authority links that are pointing to your site that too with no spammy links.
The breakdown of a good link profile is:
1. It should have lots of relevant, high authority, and high-value backlinks
2. Zero spammy links.
CONCLUSION
There you have it. Analysis of links, and how to build a balanced do follow vs no follow links and, why building a natural link profile that will impact your search rankings.
The right do follow vs no follow ratio is unknown. Google hasn’t announced the ideal ratio and I don’t think it will ever happen. Both backlinks have their advantages no matter if it’s a do follow the link or a link that just sits there collecting the dust and isn’t followed by Google’s spiders that is no follow. The first one contributes to your ranking and the later gives you visibility, even if its small.
