If you’re like most people, then SEO is quite the mystery. The learning curve is steep and ever-moving, thanks to Google changing its mind every few months as to what’s important.

However, there are some terms that never change. My goal is to help break that barrier of mystery to help empower you to learn more about what matters most to your website’s health!

For every website, there are two types of links: Follow and NoFollow. These distinctions are really important to practices like backlinks, which helps build the “street cred” of your website and brand.

So let’s go over the differences of the two!

What Are Follow Links?

Think of Follow links like bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretal (except no one is getting shoved in an oven later). Whether it’s from your site or someone else’s, when a link (marked usually through anchor text) is shown on a website, Google needs to know your opinion on it.

A “Follow” tag tells Google that you support that content/URL or on the other side, a website supports your content/URL. It boosts the authority of said URL, which can help your website shine overall!

What Are NoFollow Links?

While these aren’t necessarily detrimental, they also aren’t my favorite. Basically, it tells search engines, “This site is cool, but not cool enough for my thumbs up.”

You’ll find this from big websites like New York Times or HuffPost (I speak from personal experience). However, when you’re creating backlinks, it’s important to differentiate the type of link you’re investing in. If a backlink is NoFollow, it simply counts less than a Follow.

When This Matters The Most

Like I mentioned, backlinks can help your website soar in the rankings. I often find backlinks for clients to help them improve leaps and bounds. A great backlink is worth more than ten backlinks, somethings a lot of people don’t understand.

Remember: quality over quantity!