Seeing nofollow links
Update: The ChromEdit extension I mention below is stale and doesn’t work with Firefox 1.5. Someone has made a version for FF1.5 though; it’s called ChromEdit Plus. Follow the directions at the top of that page. The short version is 1. save the .xpi file to your desktop, then 2. drag the .xpi file over onto your browser to install the .xpi file. 3. Restart Firefox to install the extension. 4. To use, select Tools->ChromeEdit Plus->ChromEdit. Select the userContent.css tab and paste the code
a[rel~="nofollow"] {
border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200) ! important;
}
into the userContent.css area, then click Save. You might need to restart Firefox once more, but when you do, this link should have a pink background, and a dotted red line around it.
Old post follows:
The blessing/curse of learning more about SEO is that it’s often in the back of your mind; it affects how you look at regular web pages. Here’s a simple tip that will help with your X-ray vision: make nofollow links visible.
When you’re using Firefox, you can make a file called userContent.css to override the css on a given page. First you have to find the right directory; all your Firefox settings are stored in a profile directory. This page tells how to find your profile directory. Once you know the profile directory location, go into the “chrome” directory and look for a file userContent.css. If no such file exists, there may be a file called “userContent-example.css” that you can rename. Here’s what you can put into userContent.css:
a[rel~="nofollow"] {
border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200) ! important;
}
(Note: you may need to restart Firefox as well for the changes to take effect.)
Then if you want to link to a blackhat spammer without it counting as a vote in Google, just add rel=”nofollow” to the hyperlink, and you’ll be able to tell the difference between normal and nofollow links.
When you view a page, you’ll see something like this (please pardon the self-referential snapshot):
I highly recommend adding code to your userContent.css file so that you can see nofollow links easily. Note: ChromEdit is a nice extension that makes editing your userContent.css file really easy, but it currently (Jan. 14, 2006) only works with Firefox versions less than 1.5.
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Murugan Ranganathan Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 11:14 am
Matt,
Give some interesting stuff on hidden texts. How google is going to combat hidden texts (old black hat seo technique). Still i am seeing lots of sites are ranking well using hidden texts.
Joey Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 11:21 am
So Google doesn’t count the link when it sees the URL on the page, as long as it can’t follow it to the destination?
Can you do that to all of the pages links that you want the Googlebot off of, instead of a nofollow .htaccess file?
Good advice - There’s also a nice extension for Firefox (SEOpen) that you can use to pull the css off of the page or replace it with your own tags in a sidebar menu that works just as well.
Low Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 1:06 pm
I prefer the following solution because it doesn’t modify the original styles but just adds a blinking “!”:
a[rel~="nofollow"]:after {
content: “!”;
background-color: white !important;
color: red !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
text-decoration: blink !important;
}
Thomas Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 2:54 pm
Very cool trick! Got any more fun CSS Firefox tricks?
Michael Wales Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 3:40 pm
I see no reason in doing this at all, at least from a user’s standpoint. Does a link endorsement (ie. not containing rel=”nofollow”) really mean that much to me as the end-user?
Not once have I been put in the position where I had to decide on whether to follow the Black Hat SEO Link w/ the nofollow or the one w/o it, and never would I base my decision on that.
It’s good for GoogleBot’s algorithms, means little to surfers. The rel=”nofollow” is a way for GoogleBot to understand the context in which a link is placed in the page. GoogelBot doesn’t understand “OMG, this site [link] suck horribly - don’t ever go there!”
Humans do.
Justilien Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 5:03 pm
Great tip Matt. I have to agree that after getting into SEO/M I can never look at another website the same.
Off topic questions/suggestion. Netcraft offers a “Risk Rating” feature on their Toolbar for possible phishing. Has Google considered coming out with a “Spam Rating” for their Toolbar? Many of the factors they are considering for phishing could be taken into account for Spam.
----------------------
* Any other known phishing sites in the same domain.
* Whether a hostname or a numeric IP address is used in the URL.
* Whether or not a port number appears in the URL.
* The hosting ISP’s history with respect to phishing sites.
* The hosting country’s history with respect to phishing sites.
* The top level domain’s history with respect to phishing sites.
* The site’s popularity with Netcraft Toolbar users.
----------------------
Could be a good replacement for that current green bar *smirk*
Michael Martinez Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 7:51 pm
Actually, it would be useful for identifying people who try to “preserve PR”, which is still a popular notion in some SEO groups.
I don’t like the NOFOLLOW attribute, but now that it’s here, people need ways to see that it’s being used without having to sift through ugly source code all the time.
Amish Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 9:57 pm
Matt,
Do you at google have plans to track “nofollow” taged URLs for evaluation ?? like are they using tricks or techniques, etc. ??
Varun Said,
August 23, 2005 @ 11:21 pm
There is also a much easier way to do this (at least for firefox/mozilla). Simply use the TargetAlert extension.
Spamhuntress Said,
August 24, 2005 @ 3:47 am
Yeah, about hidden text. Our favorite spammers, the Zahariev’s, have hidden links on their own (Bulgarian language) website. How about penalizing them?
They cause so many bloggers grief...
TallTroll Said,
August 24, 2005 @ 6:26 am
*sigh* some people just don’t get it, do they?
BTW, I could have suggested some much more appropriate targets for the BH link
Craig Raw Said,
August 24, 2005 @ 7:01 am
I’ve just added this as a feature to the latest version of the SearchStatus extension, version 1.9. It’s available on the right-click ‘q’ menu, as a setting that persists from one session to the next. Great suggestion, thanks.
http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus
Fritz Said,
August 24, 2005 @ 9:34 am
I’m like Matt -- SEO tricks jump out at me from a web page. I think keyword density is probably the most obvious thing I notice.
About “Search Engine Web”’s commentary about labeling a website blackhat: Perhaps Matt should have written “bad neighborhood” instead? I commented recently about featureblog.com -- they haven’t been banned from Google (yet), but there is no way that I’ll link to that site, even with a nofollow anchor tag.
A Black Hat Spammer Said,
August 24, 2005 @ 11:51 am
I dont see why you all have a downer on the Black Hat Spammers.
Does my head in that my profession is always slagged off.
Leave us alone
Sebastian Said,
August 24, 2005 @ 2:39 pm
From Google’s POV, does it make sense to use the votelinks microformat (rev=”vote-for | vote-abstain | vote-against”), possibly in conjunction with rel, e.g. rev=vote-against rel=nofollow in controversial links? It carries a message for the user and the search engine as well, rel=nofollow instead is just a geeky thingy and meaningless for most human users.
Seolid Said,
August 25, 2005 @ 12:11 am
Hi Matt,
does the “nofollow” affects the notion of “neighbourhood”. ie if there is too much “nofollow”’s on a site, does this determine the site as “stand alone” and without any “neighbourhood”?
Riley
Thomas Said,
August 25, 2005 @ 12:06 pm
Ok I spoke to soon. I can’t get that to work.
Thomas Said,
August 25, 2005 @ 12:09 pm
Third time’s the charm. Make sure your quotes are proper quotes. Not those fancy ones that I got when I copied and pasted the code above.
Brian Turner Said,
August 25, 2005 @ 2:03 pm
One of the big problems with nofollow, in my opinion, is that it’s just become a poor man’s way of trying to hog PageRank.
I still have FireFox CSS set to highlight with a red background nofollow links from when it first launched - and there are a lot of very ugle pages out there, who nofollow for no apparent reason that the old “must hog PR to rank” mentality.
Some are even trying to use it to block spidering of pages, rather than a robots.txt.
Jammer Said,
August 26, 2005 @ 5:43 am
It’s a neat trick, but what about the rel=’external nofollow’ that, for example, Wordpress uses?
I think it’s better to use it as a plugin (as in SearchStatus) then to override all CSS by default. Too many people use the nofollow attribute and it’ll do no good to user-experience.
Mathias Said,
August 28, 2005 @ 6:17 am
There, I made it into a favelet: Show
nofollowlinks. The CSS used can easily be modified by simply editing the favelet.Mathias Said,
August 28, 2005 @ 6:18 am
So your comment system ate my favelet.
javascript:(function(){function cE(element){if(typeof document.createElementNS!=’undefined’){return document.createElementNS(’http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml’,element);}if(typeof document.createElement!=’undefined’){return document.cE(element);}return false;};var css=document.getElementsByTagName(’head’)[0].appendChild(cE(’link’));css.setAttribute(’rel’,’stylesheet’);css.setAttribute(’type’,'text/css’);css.setAttribute(’href’,'data:text/css,a[rel~="nofollow"]{border:thin dashed firebrick !important;background-color:#ffc8c8 !important;}’);})();
Joe Hunkins Said,
September 1, 2005 @ 4:53 pm
Matt / Mick / Rick -
SEO tips are EXCELLENT and helpful, though I think many large legitimate sites like ours (ohwy.com) would like some clues about how we can avoid the sting of the duplicate content filter. We’ve made tons of changes to no avail and remain with effectively zero traffic. If you think this site deserves it feel free to tear us apart in this blog - I just want to know how we got so hated by Google after very favorable ranking for years.
Joe
Walkman Said,
September 9, 2005 @ 6:34 pm
Matt,
this technique only serves those who are about to exchange links with sites they don’t know, or don’t trust. Instead of looking at thew source code to see if they’ll get screwed, they can just do this.
IO ERROR Said,
November 5, 2005 @ 8:33 pm
Yeah, and look at all the nofollow tags on this page!
I’d posted this trick months prior. Though I admit that mine makes it look even MORE annoying.
Hartl Said,
November 21, 2005 @ 2:58 am
Thanks a lot so far.
What about visibility:hidden. This might be usefull for the website design. But I’m looking forward to see the hidden text.
An easy deactivation for designer might be usefull, too.
Chung Said,
January 5, 2006 @ 12:49 pm
Thanks for the tip Matt. I used them now :).
cida Said,
February 1, 2006 @ 1:39 am
Being a little new to the game I see potential for enhancing the navigation of
your own site using this little gem.
Couldnt rel=”nofollow” also be used to help spiders index your site in cases where navigation bars provide multiple paths to the same page ?
Daymon Hoag Said,
February 24, 2006 @ 5:56 am
Why would you assume everyone who considers using rel=nofollow would be pointing to a black hat spammer? I was personally looking into the technique in an effort to protect ( hide ) my affiliate links from crooks and thieves. This assumption leads me to believe though Google won’t follow those links, anyone who uses them is going to be penalized.
虚拟主机 Said,
July 3, 2006 @ 6:26 pm
What’s mean about “external nofollow”?
Tool Man Said,
July 9, 2006 @ 2:41 am
It would be interesting to see how much traffic the links in the blogs themselves actually create even if google ignores them.
Search Engine Marketing Expert Said,
July 17, 2006 @ 2:45 am
虚拟主机 Said, What’s mean about “external nofollow”?
Explanation: “This attribute usually use for outer links from a websites. It refers that outer link is an external link, which means don’t consider it and don’t share PageRank with this link.”
Thilak Said,
December 24, 2006 @ 2:29 am
My Problem is that I want to participate in Text Link Ads, but I don’t want them to effect Google’s relevancy, at the sametime I can’t add nofollow to them.
Can I add a Meta Tag like to devalue all the links in the page. Will the Metatag effect my pagerank ? (My friends say that Google will award me a pagerank of zero if I do so. Is it correct ?
jason Said,
January 22, 2007 @ 5:32 pm
This is awesome. I am new to all of this SEO stuff and have just learned about the significance of the nofollow attribute to the anchor tag and yes, it has already changed the way I look at links on pages. Very cool stuff.
Steve Said,
February 1, 2007 @ 11:30 am
Hi Matt,
Would you recommend using the “nofollow” attibute on affiliate links?
Concert Tickets Said,
February 21, 2007 @ 2:05 pm
I’ve noticed a lot of blogs using the “nofollow” statements and quite a few not using them. I don’t know if they just don’t know or don’t bother with it, but how much do those links affect PageRank really? Does Google weigh the difference between a blogger posted link vs. a link placed by the webmaster?
kukuman Said,
February 26, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
Is the link in the comment box and such that big?
Most of those page are a Pagerank 0 anyway?
Peterson Said,
March 8, 2007 @ 6:18 am
No follow has become a neccessary evil in blog world, like friction in real world. The very purpose of content syndicating through blogs are at stake by the use of no follow tag. People who write lenthy comments, in facts adding content to the blog, really deserve link back to their original blog as a mean of showing coutresy.
Blogs should have other means of combating spam, if the comments are moderated, then the question of spam never arises. Recently I
d started a blog about lcd buying guide and there are many blogs about these topic and I hope I’ll continously add more guidelines about the technological advances in lcd tv field, so the users and other bloggers will get really benefited.
Computer Geek Said,
April 23, 2007 @ 9:07 pm
What is the difference between and “external nofollow” and just a plain old “nofollow”?
Perfect Wealth Formula Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 8:05 pm
The nofollow tag is good to use for internal links
on your site for pages that don’t need page rank
i.e. your privacy policy page, contact us page etc.
Peter Nisbet Said,
May 27, 2007 @ 2:52 am
I use the nofollow tag for links to pages such as Privacy, and also to links to other pages on my site that I don’t want spiders to be sidetracked to. Is this wrong? I believe that the spiders follow them anyway, just neither give PR to the destination page nor take it from the source page. Am I wrong?
However, I had read so much rubbish about nofollow that I think many people seem completely confused.
Bert Said,
June 4, 2007 @ 8:16 am
Is there a way to put rel=nofollow in css without having to put it in each tag?
Alan Said,
June 4, 2007 @ 10:16 pm
Eventually, all links will have a nofollow tag and google’s system of the value of links will be stone dead. And the google index will be reduced to a few million pages - all of them on google properties.
Luxury Blog Said,
June 27, 2007 @ 12:38 am
Is the link in the comment box and such that big?
Most of those page are a Pagerank 0 anyway?
Sam Kern Said,
July 3, 2007 @ 3:42 am
Thanks for shedding lights on no follow. From what i understand, wordpress blogs now have as default no follow tags to blog post and comments. Is it the same with blogger and typepad?
garden sheds Said,
July 11, 2007 @ 6:50 pm
Hey, i’d have to agree that SEOpen the firefox plugin is well worth it.
Cheers, ToNy!
garden sheds Said,
July 11, 2007 @ 6:55 pm
Actually i just found i can do it with another plugin i was already running, “SearhStatus”
It shows the PR, Alexa ranks in your bottom bar and i just found it had an option to turn on “No Follow” highlighting.
Peter Fox Said,
July 15, 2007 @ 8:16 am
I can think of good ways of using nofollow tags in the future but I’m a little cautious; will they be causing sites to be penalised in the future for using SEO techniques? I know I shouldn’t be paranoid but ... OK, so I’m paranoid.
Franz Said,
July 16, 2007 @ 7:32 pm
The nofollow tag is good to use for internal links
on your site for pages that don’t need page rank
Markedsføring på internett - Brandpoint Said,
July 21, 2007 @ 9:36 am
Concert Tickets asked: Does Google weigh the difference between a blogger posted link vs. a link placed by the webmaster?
Someone?
Thomaz Said,
July 24, 2007 @ 9:25 pm
Matt Cutts,
this technique only serves those who are about to exchange links with sites... they don’t know, or don’t trust. Instead of looking at thew source code to see if they’ll get screwed, they can just do this!!
Like Said,
July 26, 2007 @ 4:19 am
Hey, i’d have to agree that SEOpen the firefox plugin is well worth it.
Cheers, ToNy!
Rick Vidallon Said,
September 7, 2007 @ 3:39 pm
Is this a phishing site??
http://urlwww--google--com.rtrk.com/
hlvis Said,
September 12, 2007 @ 9:07 pm
Hi Matt...fyi was checking links in my webmastercentral and I noticed labs.darkseoteam.com had seemingly duplicated entire content of your blog? and they were shown as a link to me as a result of a previous post on your blog!? Not a backlink I’m interested in...Whassup? And also...where is a good place you might suggest for a question like this? Thanks and best regards... please feel free to contact me directly for more details and of course delete this post...hmmm. I’m seeing the suggestion to go to the forum...I’ll do that, but wanted to be sure you knew of your personal blog being duplicated...
Poker Said,
September 13, 2007 @ 7:20 am
There are also FF plugins that do that!
sam Said,
September 13, 2007 @ 10:30 am
Matt,
I am new to website publishing, I admit to being a little lost on the no-follow tag. I wonder what good is it to the blog publisher to use no-follow tags? Is it to control where your site is linked? Just wondering.
Marcos Said,
September 17, 2007 @ 10:21 am
Hi Sam,
The purpose of this tag is a bit mysterious. First it only applies to google.
Secondly, it will still pass a “vote” on for that particular url. Apparently, google’s index spider won’t follow it for caching and indexing purposes.
So if it’s a link to another page in your own site it won’t get indexed but if it’s a link to another website then a vote will be passed.
SEO Expert Dubai Said,
September 19, 2007 @ 2:37 pm
Hi Matt, Grate stuff inhere i liked the css tricks and thank you all for sharing this grate information.
vkotes Said,
October 18, 2007 @ 3:27 am
Thanks for this useful tool.
A question to Marcos: I thought that the nofollow tag would prevent passing a vote (i.e. a portion of the PR for that page) to another site.
The Dog Clothing Company Said,
October 18, 2007 @ 9:34 am
This is great information that I have been googling for. Thanks for the post and God Bless!
Thai Style Said,
December 22, 2007 @ 4:31 am
rel=”No Follow” is used to stop the search engines from counting the link as a vote from site A for site B. The link is still found by the search engines, however it is ignored when it is time to calculate Pagerank and the ranking systems of all the major search engines. It is used by all the major search engines. NOT only Google.
Hope this clarifies a few things!
Dubai Real Estate Company Said,
December 27, 2007 @ 1:22 pm
Is there a tool I can use in IE to see if a particular link is ‘No Follow’ or not?
SEO Dubai Said,
December 27, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
Thats a nice CSS code. I have been looking for it. Thanks...
Henri Said,
January 19, 2008 @ 6:10 am
Why uses Wordpress nofollow in the comments? The admin can check the comments. It’s a terrible feature, beacause many bloggers don’t want to use nofollow. It would be great to use nofollow with internal pages.
AOF Said,
January 19, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
I tried TargetAlert - very cool tool but “external nofollow” are not being highlighted (”nofollow”) are. I’ve written to the author to ask for this to be fixed.
/AOF
forex Said,
January 28, 2008 @ 6:48 am
So if it’s a link to another page in your own site it won’t get indexed but if it’s a link to another website then a vote will be passed.
Srikanth Said,
July 14, 2008 @ 4:51 am
Is there a plugin for Internet Explorer that does this?