Technologically, there are only two types of backlinks I focus on building for clients – dofollow backlinks and nofollow backlinks. We can acquire (pay for) or earn (not pay for) these two different types of links.
We build both types of backlinks to have a diverse backlink portfolio. A backlink portfolio is the percent of nofollow and dofollow backlinks to a website. If you’re buying links (acquired backlinks) and you don’t build no follow links, your site will likely get flagged by Google as attempting to manipulate search results. So as we build dofollow backlinks, we have to build nofollow backlinks simultaneously.
A ratio I follow is for every dofollow link we build, we should build ten nofollow links.
What Are Dofollow Backlinks
Dofollow backlinks that aren’t user generated, but rather placed there by the web master. Say you write a piece of content and link out to another website as a resource for your user to go on to learn more, that is a dofollow backlink.
To see if a link is a dofollow backlink, inspect the link. If there isn’t a rel tag, it is a dofollow link.
What Are Nofollow Backlinks
Nofollow backlinks are links that are user generated. Think links in Twitter tweets, Pinterest pins, or Reddit posts. Nofollow links are sometime called social links because social medias typically create them.
While nofollow backlinks don’t have as much SEO energy as dofollow links, they are critical to a healthy backlink portfolio and I have personally seen just nofollow links rank content. Pinterest and Quora are great ways to build nofollow backlinks.
To know if a link is a nofollow backlink inspect the link and you will see nofollow in the rel tag.
What Are Acquired Backlinks
Acquired backlinks are backlinks you pay or trade for. I’ve had a great experience buying acquired links from Fat Joe SEO. They do blogger reachout and link placement for you.
Acquired backlinks can be both dofollow and nofollow. An example of a nofollow backlink is a link you paid for to be in the description of a YouTuber’s video.
What Are Earned Backlinks
Earned backlinks are backlinks that we acquire naturally. They can be in the forms of other websites linking to our content or links from social media.
Say you got a link from YouTuber that you didn’t pay for, this would be an earned backlink.
