Dofollow social media, directories, forums and blogs

What social media sites allow “dofollow” links and why does this matter?

Every hyperlink to your website from another website is a vote of confidence for your website. Search engines generally recognise this by increasing your search engine ranking gradually as the number of quality relevant links to your website accrue (“back-links”). Backlinks from social media properties are a way to increase your website’s rankings on search engine results pages. But, most social media sites add the “nofollow” attribute to their outbound hyperlinks, thereby reducing the effectiveness of back-links in influencing search engine rankings. Youtube, facebook and twitter are a few examples of social media sites that automatically add the nofollow attribute to links.

Social media sites add the “nofollow” attribute presumably to deter link spamming: the tendency for Internet marketers to post repeated links to artificially inflate google rankings of their client websites. However, the “nofollow” penalty can be seen as unnatural. If many people wish to give a vote of confidence to a website by linking to it from social media, this mirrors the real-life concept of word-of-mouth recommendation. Should it not be allowed to occur?

The dofollow/nofollow debate continues. While it does, I have compiled a short list of social media sites that allow “dofollow” hyperlinks and encourage visitors to frequent these sites as a thank you for their allowing a natural flow of interaction.

Dofollow in social media