Follow the Leader

I love the DoFollow movement. Forget Page Rank, an idea whose time is rapidly fading anyway (yes, I do have a site with good page rank, and I still think that the end is near for it), there are way too many other ways of measuring a site now, and they don’t require you to hurt your readers in order to do it.

But, how can you tell if a blog or other site really is DoFollow like they claim? Or how can you tell if your own plug-in/page editing has resulted in successfully removing all the nofollow stuff from your blog?

I’ve discovered two ways. The first one is very simple, the second a bit harder, but the second one is my favorite.

I should say that both of these are for Firefox. It might be possible to edit the second one for IE, I’m not sure.

1) There is an exceptional Firefox tool called SEO for Firefox. I recommend this program for all the information it gives you about websites, and it also includes the ability to highlight (in whatever color you prefer) nofollow links. Very simple, add the program, restart Firefox, right click on a page, choose options, and put a checkmark beside “nofollow” links: Enable/Disable highlighting.

2) I need to find the link to the page where I first discovered this code. Unfortunately, the code also highlighted the nofollow links and I wanted something that would mark them, but in a way that didn’t draw my attention from other parts of the page. So what follows is my modified code and how to use it.

First, you need to be able to edit the userContent.css. I use MR Tech Local Install, but there are other add-ons that also allow you to edit this.

Second, at the end of the userContent page, add the following:

a[rel~=”nofollow”] {
border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
}

Save, and restart Firefox. Now, every link that is set to nofollow on a page will have an unobtrusive thin red dashed box around it. It doesn’t stand out when you’re reading content, and is easy to spot whenever you want to see whether the links on the page are followed or not.