How to know a link is DoFollow or not?

By | January 23, 2009

dofollowI see a lot of newbie webmasters asking how to know whether a link is DoFollow or NoFollow in the webmaster forums.  Some people say just see the source code to see whether there is a “NoFollow” attribute to the link.  If it is not there, it is a DoFollow.  But what if you are checking a group of websites for link building.  It is tedious and time taking task, right!

What is DoFollow attribute?
It is a hyperlink attribute which tells search engines not to pass any significance or value to the outbound links.  If your site has a Google Pagerank (PR) of 5 and a DoFollow link goes to another site, which has zero PR, it is going to get some PR when Google updates the Pagerank.  NoFollow also prevents spammers spamming the high PR sites with their spam links.

So, what is the easy way to check whether a site is DoFollow or NoFollow easily?  Here comes the tiny Firefox plugin, NoDoFollow, which makes it pretty easier.  Get the plugin here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

Once, it is installed you can see the option of “NoDoFollow” in the right click context menu.  Now launch a webpage, right click, and select the option.  That’s all, the plugin will turn all the DoFollow links to light blue and NoFollow links to light red.  It is so simple.  Isn’t it!

nodofollow

Plugin in action

4 thoughts on “How to know a link is DoFollow or not?

  1. Jordan Pearce

    You have to be careful because some sites are dofollow but have a mix of ‘nofollow’ attributes. This is a great tool that I’ve been using for awhile.

    Reply

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