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):
<a href="page-B.html">Link text</a>
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:
<a href="page-B.html" rel="">Link text</a>
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:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
or :
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
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.