SEO TIP: Viewing NOFOLLOW Links On The Web
By Gerard McGarry on 28th August 2007, filed in Search Engine Optimisation, Social Networking. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Tags: FireFox, nofollow, SEO, Tips
Aaron Wall’s brilliantly useful SEO For Firefox plugin can show you a lot about websites via the search results – PageRank, age of site, number of backlinks, etc.
For me however, the most useful feature of the plugin highlights links that have had rel=”nofollow” applied to them. This can be useful when doing link building campaigns. For instance, take a look at del.icio.us and StumbleUpon – both universally apply nofollow to all links except internal ones. There’s no PageRank value in those types of links, although there may be a short term traffic boost from submitting your site to them.
If you use SEO For FireFox, you’ll be stunned at the number of sites that apply nofollow on outgoing links. Naturally, blog comments are mostly nofollowed, but sites like YouTube also apply nofollow.
Changing the highlighter color – can be done by going to Tools, Options in Firefox and clicking the Options button on the SEO For Firefox entry. The default red is quite shocking when you see it splashed across a page, but it makes text unreadable.
I prefer to switch it to a lighter color for better legibility. When you update the options, the new highlighted color is applied upon the next page refresh.
