How To Increase Your Website Traffic: DoFollow versus NoFollow

How to increase my traffic? Do follow, No follow? What does it do and how does it affect my site? This is not something new but I wanted to impart this to those new bloggers out there or even for those who wanted to start building their own websites for either personal or business purposes.

Whether you’re new to blogging or not, your primary concern is how to drive traffic into your website, right? You wanted to encourage people from keeping them as your regular readers for articles that you post. Social Networking sites are the most popular medium nowadays to do that deed, but you sure don’t want to post again and again your articles in your own wall or on your friends’ wall just to ask them to go to your website. Of course you also wanted to be included in the search result page of any search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask, whenever someone queries something which may be related to one of your article.

There are so many ways to increase traffic to drive people to visit their websites, others webmasters or administrators even invest money just to achieve their objective. However, there is one simple way to do this but it will require a little effort from your end – let’s talk about the DoFollow versus NoFollow.

Note: I am NOT here to discuss the whole SEO process, how to achieve page rank in Google, Link exchange, anything alike – I myself is not a SEO guru and it takes a lot of hard work to achieve it, one good example is posting articles with good, if not superb, quality content once a week, something new and fresh. The more you publish articles like this will surely increase your position in Google search.

Definition:

NoFollow – is a value assigned to rel attribute of an HTML, in its simplest explanation, it instruct search engines not to follow hyperlinks found on your site. NoFollow attributes does not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.

DoFollow – is not really a rel attribute of an HTML but a description which is the opposite of nofollow. It allows search engines such as Google to crawl your entire website and once a link has been found, the search engine bot follows that landing unto another page to crawl.

So what can these two attributes do to affect the traffic of my website? The answer is simple – most of these readers of yours also own their own blog page and they wanted the same thing. And so what? It depends on how you configured your blog site, if you set it to DoFollow, it will attract more readers and post their comments on each of your articles. So what? Most bloggers love back links, well who doesn’t? Having said, it will drive more traffic to your site. Another advantage is if you’re using CPM advertisement, it will also be an advantage for you to earn more.

However, dofollows also have its disadvantages and one of them is you’re also encouraging the other type of search engine – the spamdexing or search engine spam. Prepare yourself from getting a lot of spam comments so in turn, managing these spam comments will become tedious on your part sooner or later especially if you don’t have protections such as Akismet or Captcha. Since you have turned off the nofollow attribute, expect that your bandwidth will not be only consumed by real-people reading your posts but also by good and harmful bots – needless to say your blog site’s performance might deteriorate. Lastly, if you don’t screen and review each comment and you have set your blog to automatically post your readers’ comment, chances are you’ll get non-substantial responses because all they want is the opportunity to create a back link.

Conclusion:

It’s up to you to decide whether you wanted to use either of the two attributes. The nofollow attribute was created to protect your site but it does not mean that you can’t turn it off if you wanted to gain more traffic. If you wanted to take the risk of turning it off, then you should closely monitor and protect your website as well so that you can immediately apply the necessary steps to counter these disadvantages.

The choice is yours!