Today, every blogger and his kid(no offence 
) knows what rel="nofollow" attribute is. It is an important aspect in optimising your site for Google. Most bloggers use them to link to sites which they do not want to give credit to (like bad neighbourhood/competitors).
It is an unwritten law of the blogosphere to link when quoting someone. However, Google will punish you if you link to blacklisted sites, through lower rankings. Luckily, you can use a special tag, rel=nofollow which, when added instructs the Googlebot not to credit the site.
No-follow is a way of telling Google bots that the link should not be indexed. However, there is no difference in links when you see them on the browser.
Nofollow is very useful for on-site optimisation. You can weed out all unnecessary outgoing links on your homepage, like the more tag, categories, archives etc. Once you add them, you may want to check whether all links are properly optimised with the tag. However, this task turns out to be quite painfull, as you have to manually weed through tons of HTML code, to find that elusive link without nofollow. This tedious task is unavoidable…
Until now! Meet the SEO for Firefox extension, which highlights nofollow links. In my hunt for useful Firefox extensions, I found the SEO for Firefox, a handy extension for bloggers.
Apart from highlighting nofollow links, it can fetch you google PR, links(via google, yahoo, msn), .edu and .gov links etc. A cool plugin for the SEO-ers, it stands upto its rather cocky name. In fact, after installing this extension, I have not visited any PR-checking sites.
You can use the extension options menu to customise everything from the colour of nofollow highlight, to the pre-fetch duration of all info.
From now on, you do not have to waste your valuable time clicking View>Source and scrolling – just use this extension.
Update: When I posted this with the extension activated and in “Visual mode”, it kept on adding style="background-color: yellow" (since I had chosen yellow as the colour for nofollow, from Options) to the last link, ie download link. Did anyone else get this bug?
Get our latest articles for free by email:
I was researching nofollow when I found that WordPress has it enabled by default. I have installed dofollow on prozilla.com just because it encourages comments. Uisng Akismet and using moderation is all you really need to control spam. Anyone can feel free to come over and comment on my articles, as they be rewarded with a dofollow link and my site benefits from fresh content. More sites should go back to using dofollow to help their PR. Don’t like the comment, don’t approve it
Typical Google flip/flop.
If a page is Unranked, nofollow isn’t going to matter anyway. You don’t get any credit for the link unless there are PR points to go around.
Every NYT article page I’ve seen is unranked. And in addition, some of the articles I’m seeing now are using nofollow; it seems inconsistent.
Wow – I’ve been using SEO for Firefox for a while, but didn’t realize it had this functionality. I’ve been doing the manual work of viewing source, ctrl F and typing in “nofollow” all this time. This will help!
Best way to see how much your links are worth and that is why I do it.
After I added no follows to my sites my traffic increased dramatically. Some of my sites were old and had collected outbound links for years. Just cleaning those up made a huge difference.
i dont think so …. a single link to a blacklisted site will make ur account disabled
@Ashwini: Google is concerned only about blogs which link to blacklisted sites in a large scale. A single link isn’t necessarily a problem.
@Ben: Thanks.
@Linu: Thanks, and what’s the problem with the download link? I added a target=”_blank” to the link, so that it opens in a new window. I tested it too. I hope that solves your problem.
“However, Google will punish you if you link to blacklisted sites, through lower rankings.”
Are you sure as thousands of blogs link to john chow dot com which already been penalized?
Nice find… I have been using SearchStatus extension to accomplish the same talk. if you’re using SearchStatus goto Menu — > Highlight Nofollow Links. this is hight the links with nofollow attribute in current tab.
Sumesh: that could be a neat firefox extension. I would use it and see how it works.
I used to check the source code for checking nofollow tag.
But what’s wrong with that “Download SEO for Firefox” Link. When I clicked on it, it just returned to your homepage???
Linu