The Importance of “do-follow” Links for Link Building

Not all backlinks are equal, most blog, forums and some directories attached a “no follow” tag to back links to your site. This is very important because this tells the search engine to ignore the value of this backlink when deciding upon the ranking of your site. No follow links were invented to prevent Spamers from attacking sites like Wikipedia and YouTube and filling them full of spam. Building links to these sites will add no value to your link building activities. On the other hand some site still offer “do follow” links, how can you tell the difference?

1. All the large social networking sites Linked-In, Wikipedia, Flicker, Twitter are no-follow so these are a waste of time for link building. Although viral marketing via a promotional video may be another source of traffic.
2. Some article sites offer do-follow links and you can find a list here http://dofollow.info/dofollow-article-directories/
3. Most blogs comments are “no-follow” but if you offer to write a guest post then often bloggers will include a do-follow link at the bottom of the text.
4. Some social bookmark sites offer do-follow links including Digg.
5. Some directories offer do-follow links, but it’s worth checking first.

So How can I check if a site offers “do-follow” links

The easiest way is to use Google Chrome as a browser. This will overlay a box over those links which are no follow, this way you can make sure that you only spend your time on sites that offer do-follow links. See the screen shot below from Wikipedia showing the no-follow links highlighted in a box.