[rel='external nofollow']

I went to mat blog and he is using [rel='external nofollow'] probably the same effect as “nofollow” but doesn’t highlight on firefox plugins.

 

Looks like it only no follows external links, thats a pretty nice extension to the nofollow meta tag!

Agh apparently i give you rep too often so i cant give you anymore right now..

 

This is a wordpress thing :
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=65553

 

I think he use this extension to prevent spam links to get indexed and followed.

 

search for the file called usercontent.css this is for firefox, and add the following css code

a[rel="external nofollow"] {
border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200) ! important;
}

this will highlight the no follow links

 

Very nice tip, rep added thanks.

 

So Matt uses it, but he hasn't blogged about it, as far as I can tell. The meaning does seem to be that only external links won't be followed. Which would have obvious benefits. But I'm not sure it's an officially recognized tag - so it's unclear whether it would actually work.

[source: I just googled the tag, it's all over the forums, but doesn't give any results from either Matt Cutts blog itself or the official google blog]

 

google design this method for wordpress, and yes that tag is very effective, but worpress blog comments use it.

 

does any one know of a way building back links with blogs or other types of technqiues?

 

Weird that they designed that tag, but did not blog about it. Or did I just not google very efficiently?

 

It is nothing that "Google designed". There is rel="nofollow" and if you want to add CSS or JS to links you can put more stuff into the rel="" attribute.

 

Does the tag get used on all wordpress comments.

 

yes google designed this pacifically for this reason for blogs, they had to change it around .

 

What they "designed" was rel="nofollow". The "external" part has crap to do with that.

 

That's what I thought. And as long as google doesn't use that , it doesn't actually work. So rel="external nofollow" would be the same as rel="nofollow" as far as the google search engine is concerned. The external in there is probably just to be able to style the link differently (which a lot of blogs, including Matt Cutts' blog) do.