Joe Hayes {dot} Org

As you may already know, placing a re=”nofollow” attribute on a link will tell search engines, like Google, to not follow the link – or give credit as a vote when it comes to search rankings. This is a pretty popular thing to do to control the links in user generated content like forums and blogs – since you are who you link to, so to speak. This also helps to discourage spammers from targetting your web pages, though not always.

At any rate, you may have reasons to quickly and easily find the nofollowed links on a page, to see if your tags are done right or to easily detect where and what is getting the nofollow tag on a page. We won’t go into all of the uses, though you can use your imagination. At any rate:

Internet Explorer Detection

Paste this code into your url bar on the page you’re wanting to check, or do what I do and make it a link favorite so you can check the page with one click. I link this better than the FireFox method because maybe I don’t want every nofollow link highlighted on every page I view…

javascript: var anchors;anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");var anchorIndex;for(anchorIndex = 0;anchorIndex < anchors.length;anchorIndex++) { if(anchors[anchorIndex].getAttribute("rel") && anchors[anchorIndex].getAttribute("rel")=="nofollow") anchors[anchorIndex].style.backgroundColor="red";} void(0);

Firefox Nofollow Detection

You could install the SeoQuake extension and turn the nofollow highlight on in the options, or search for userContent.css and add this anywhere inside of it… (Windows XP users can find it at C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\yad55ash.default(varies)\chrome\userContent.css)

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

Google Chrome Nofollow Detection

Drag this into your bookmarks…

Safari Nofollow Detection

This is pretty much the same as Internet Explorer (IE6 or IE7), again I’d suggest making a bookmark of any page then editing the url location with this javascript…

javascript:var%20a=document.getElementsByTagName('a');for(var%20z=0;z%3Ca.length;%20z++){if(a[z].rel==’nofollow’){a[z].style.border=’1px%20solid%20%23F00';}}