I am a newbie in SEO and like to know that, how to check if a forum is do follow? or please correct me if I am asking a wrong question
If forum is no-follow then they are use no-follow tag in their meta tags which indicate to google bot (Robert) to don't index that page, if you are still confuse then add your link on the forum and after one day check your instances if you get link from this then it means it's do-follow.
The best way to check no follow or do follow is to have a look over the page source. As every sort of software or add ons only do the same thing. So check the pagesource, search for rel="external no follow" or rel="no follow", if it exist then the page is having no follow attribute
In signature you can check its property and see do follow or no follow and some forums provides info. in signature part they do follow or no follow.
If you are using fire fox browser than you can install SEO for firefox addon which highlights the no follow links
Install the addon NoDoFollow 1.1 to firefox browser which highlights do follow signature in the forum. It is the easiest way to identify do follow forum
U can simply install this tool to check out that whether the specific forum is follow or no follow - http://www.quirk.biz/download-searchstatus.
Just search on google "dofollow addon for fire fox" color blue means the link is dofollow and red means no follow
I definitely agree. I also practice the same. However, to make it faster, easier and more efficient, I use Search Status. If your browser is Mozilla, you can download it right away. Just don't forget to check the Highlight NOfollow links for it to work efficiently when you right click the search status icon that is located in the lower right portion of your screen. As you can see, some of them here use it, so why not give it a try? *winks*
Firefox used to have a nodofollow addon that worked good, but it don't work in ff 3.5x or 3.6x. Guess they haven't updated it in a while or something. Search status addon works good and comes with other goodies. I think the mozrank toolbar/addon comes with nofollow option too. It works the same. The benefit of the older nodofollow addon was it highlighted both nofollow (red) and dofollow (blueish/purpleish) so you could easily see what was going on in a page. The others seem to only highlight nofollow's (red), but it's easy enough to figure out too.
I used seo4firefox and seoquake add-ons for Firefox for this purpose. You would also get other nice SEO features from these 2 tools. Very helpful for SEO purpose. Have a nice day,
My vote is for the fire fox extension search status. It also has a lot of other features that are handy