does "nofollow" necessarily have to be seen in 'view source'

I cant seem to find an answer to this, but in order to find out the nofollow/noindex status of a page, is the only way to do a "view source" and look for those two attributes? I noticed that some wikis do not have them within their view source...I'm guessing that it's possible to have them set as a server-side script that can't be seen in the code...is that true?

 

To my knowledge it has to be in the main script, so if it doesnt you are getting power from it!

But even if it is nofollow, the other search engines still count it as a powerful link to your site

 

Thanks! I actually tested this out on aboutus(.)org which is a Wiki, they don't appear to have nofollow on anything.

 

Cool, thanks for that tip then

 

i think it would be better to use robots.txt

 

yes robots.txt will be the better option for that

 

You could have redirects like www.domain.com/redirect/www.outboundlink.com/ and have a robots.txt file tell search engines not to index the /redirect/ directory.

 

There's a firefox plugin that highlights the nofollow links on every page you visit, so you don't have view the sourcecode everytime. Much easier!

 

Try downloading this tool quirk.biz/searchstatus/ to see links that has nofollow attribute.

 

it's not possible with server side.

the best way for checking nofollow exist or not is checking the sourse code