Detecting NoFollow Links

Written by Joe on March 13, 2009 – 1:38 pm -

No-FollowAs 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…

Highlight NoFollows

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';}}


Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 16 Comments »

16 Responses to “Detecting NoFollow Links”

  1. Juniatop Says:

    Learned a lot from your article. Good job!

  2. Share Tips on Mobile Says:

    very useful…thanks a lot

  3. ProbusinessGuy Says:

    I think google should give higher rankings to blogs that use dofollow. I dont know if they do but they should give some sort of bonus for being dofollow and not nofollow.

  4. joe Says:

    Hi there check out my New E-Book for quick traffic to your site it’s only $1.95 thats a cup of coffee Plus you get acsess to over 1000 one way link’s FREE. And a tip on how i got over $1000 in pormo codes for google to save you advertising costs to get going. I still have the emails if you want proof. And Free Link Building software.
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  5. Marvis Pulham Says:

    OMG! I found this site on Bing. this is really great stuff! I have bookmarked. I will be back!

  6. Melvin Says:

    I didn’t know it’s so easy to check nofollow

  7. seo Says:

    Very tricky this microformat rel=”nofollow”.
    In wordpress this is predefined for external links, as it is your’s 2! :-)

  8. Share Tips Says:

    Very good post, I was really searching for this topic, as I wanted this topic to understand completely and it is also very rare in internet, that is why it was very difficult to understand ,

    No one give the complete details about this ” no follow ” tags, but you have given complete information ,

    thanks a lot and keep posting about these types of important and rare topics

  9. Tasia Umin Says:

    I’m aware of this already, but nevertheless there are several useful bits which completed the picture for me, regards!

  10. best external hard drives Says:

    Good jobs, i is indeed a great article regarding tips of web promotion online. I personally would like to use these tips for my blog related to the best external hard drives as well.

  11. Link Specialist Says:

    Well, im using firefox’s no follow detection add-on. It’s so easy to detect it where the link is highlighted with red which is considered this a noFollow link.

  12. Civil Engineer Says:

    Very good post, I was really searching for this topic, as I wanted this topic to understand completely and it is also very rare in internet, that is why it was very difficult to understand ,

  13. Webdesign Bamberg Says:

    Great post, very usefull for finding do follow Links!

  14. Holzbackofen Says:

    Year, that´s rocks!

  15. iphone 5 Says:

    ..is there an addon to see do or no follow links for IE…the same as for chrome and mozzila?..cnat find anything.

  16. Appleton Auto Accident Lawyers Says:

    Thank you for sharing this, it’s now easy to determine if the links were do/nofollow. This helped me a lot.

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