Webmastery and SEO Community

I have had the SEO for Firefox plugin installed for a while now, but not until I cam across a nofollow article written by Aaron Wall  over at SEOBook, did I realise how to really use it.  This article will explain a little bit about what it is and what it can do in relation to nofollow to save you a lot of time (and clicking) to get the relevent data. I will do another article to explain the full functional use for the SEO extention for Firefox, for now you can find one of the SEO extention for Firefox link at the bottom of this article.

Mostly, I installed the extention a while back to gather some useful information such as Alexa, Google and Yahoo! ranks, but little did I know that the extention also has an option to highlight links that have the nofollow attribute which is something bloggers and blog owners should take seriously.

The attribute nofollow is a tag that was invented by Google in an attempt to help illiminate comment spamming a few years back that Google has since flip flopped on. The concept was that when comment spammers placed a URL to get a backlink (to help their PR), that a no follow attribute was assigned to the link so the search engines wouldn’t follow it. Sounded good, except it didn’t work because spammers simply didn’t care and a link was still present in the browser that visitors can follow.

Now, Google seems to be punishing some webmasters that have excessive comments using nofollow tag, which Matt Cutts talks about in the following video:

So what can we do? Well when it comes to Google we just have to go with the flow, because with one little algorithm change we can go from hero to zero almost over night. A #1 ranking can go to #1000 just because of something as simple as excessive use of nofollow like what matt talks about. But with the use of the SEO extention for Firefox we can easily find the website that have dofollow so we are not flooding blogs with nofollow links that appear to be spam. First you will need to download the extention and next to set the option to display nofollow. You may want to watch Aaron’s video below the download link on the page before returning here.

You can download SEO for Firefox here.

Set nofollow in Options

Once you have the extention installed and you restart Firefox, you are going to a bunch of data that display below each search result, this data is useful to get PR and other rankings which Aaron Wall explained, but for what we are doing (in regards to nofollow), we are only going to be concerned at this point with the Option to set for nofollow links.

1) right click on any open page in Firefox

2) Select SEO/PPC

3) Select Options

4) Under the Settings tab, tick off  Highlight ‘nofollow’ weblinks in webpages and select a noticable colour. I have select bright red as most websites won’t use this.

Next do a search of blogs/forums that are relevant to your comments you want to leave to create a backlink. Websites that have nofollow will have a box in your selected colour around them. It will be up to you now, if the site is relevant if you wish to leave a comment with your URL.

WordPress and nofollow

Now that we have gone over nofollow and leaving comments, lets look at nofollow on your own blog website. Specifically, WordPress

WordPress, which is what Prozilla 2.0 is based on, automatically has the nofollow attribute programmed in that many webmasters are no aware of, however there is a WordPress plugin at allows for dofollow which we have installed. The reason why we did this, is that nofollow simply isn’t needed, in my opinion anyway, because if you are properly managing your blog website, then dofollow can be something that works for you because it gives your visitors some link juice for their comments that in turn increases the value of your own website. Here are the steps to getting it done:

1). Install Akismet: Akismet is a comment spam plugin for WordPress. Using an API key, Akismet will cut down or even illiminate the amount of spam comments. It can be downloaded here.

2). Install DoFollow: DoFollow is a plugin that removes the default WordPress setting of nofollow and replaces it with the attribute of external. It can be downloaded here.

3). Moderation settings: In the WordPress admin area under Settings, go to Discussion where Before a comment appears is displayed, tick off: An administrator must always approve the comment

That concludes this little article on nofollow. Feel free to post your relevant comments below and enjoy the dofollow backlink