Does anyone know where I can get the firefox plugin that tells you whether a site uses no-follow or not?
Well I use quirk.biz/searchstatus This is a great tool. It provides Pagerank, Alexa rank & as well Compete Rankings. Additionally it provides many other features like Highlight NoFollow Links, Meta Tags, Show in Archive.org, Show Whois, Show Robots.txt, Show Keyword Density, Highlight keywords, Show Indexed Pages & lastly Show Backward links.
There are plenty, but they'll slow your browser down. If you're really concerned, just right click a link, hit properties, and check.
I also use "searchstatus" - great functions and no slowdown of the browser at all! Give it a try. Also you can check the "web developer toolbar" for firefox.
I am using searchstatus from last one year & I never faced a problem of slowdown of the browser. Web Developer Tool is also a great tool for the webmasters but I dont think it has a feature to highlight no follow links.
Then it is do-follow. If you don't seen anything then the chances are amazingly high the link will be followed. I also use searchstatus firefox for all the other info too. DK
Here are two extensions for Firefox that you can use to verify which links on a website have the rel="follow" attribute and which links have the rel="nofollow" attribute: NoDoFollow SearchStatus Otherwise, use the free tool from Smart PageRank.
There's no signal for do-follow; either a link is nofollow'ed, or it's not. Actually, that isn't quite true ... there are other ways to hide a link from search engines than nofollow. You can use a robots.txt file to hide the entire page, including all the links in, or a robots meta. You can write the links in javascript instead of raw html ( this is how adsense works ), since major search engines don't execute scripts on a page before indexing it. A site can even cloak, to show you what look like seo links but show Google nofollows. SeoQuake ( which I use myself, occasionally ) won't tell you if any of these things are happening; it will only tell you a link is nofollow, or it's not. That's supposed to be all that matters, but it can lure you into a false sense of security. That said, a nofollow link looks like this: <a href="http://www.example.com/ rel="nofollow">anchor text goes here</a> A lot of sites use external nofollow ... as long as the word nofollow is part of the rel attribute, it will be ignored by the major search engines. When you right click a link in firefox and hit properties, if there's a rel attribute, it will tell you its value. If you don't see nofollow, that's the same check a lot of plug ins do. PS - Photoshop may as well be my operating system. I use the computer pretty heavily, so if I complain about slowness, it doesn't mean that's a problem in normal circumstances.
Here's a small update on the two extensions for the Firefox browser, NoDoFollow and SearchStatus, which I suggested previously. I tested both extensions and found that there may be a flaw in the NoDoFollow extension. Apparently, this extension only detects the rel="nofollow" attribute. If the relationship attribute is not consistently used on a page, i.e. hyperlinks with rel="nofollow", with rel="follow" and without the relationship attribute exist, then the hyperlinks without rel="nofollow" are indicated as do-follow links, regardless of the property of the meta-robots tag. This means that links may show up as do-follow links, whereas in reality they are no-follow links. SearchStatus doesn't have this flaw, so I recommend to use that extension. Can anyone confirm/deny this? P.S.: Nice article you suggested there, Forrest!