Today, every blogger and his kid(no offence 😉 ) knows what rel="nofollow" attribute is. It is an important aspect in optimising your site for Google. Most bloggers use them to link to sites which they do not want to give credit to (like bad neighbourhood/competitors).
It is an unwritten law of the blogosphere to link when quoting someone. However, Google will punish you if you link to blacklisted sites, through lower rankings. Luckily, you can use a special tag, rel=nofollow which, when added instructs the Googlebot not to credit the site.
No-follow is a way of telling Google bots that the link should not be indexed. However, there is no difference in links when you see them on the browser.
Nofollow is very useful for on-site optimisation. You can weed out all unnecessary outgoing links on your homepage, like the more tag, categories, archives etc. Once you add them, you may want to check whether all links are properly optimised with the tag. However, this task turns out to be quite painfull, as you have to manually weed through tons of HTML code, to find that elusive link without nofollow. This tedious task is unavoidable…
Until now! Meet the SEO for Firefox extension, which highlights nofollow links. In my hunt for useful Firefox extensions, I found the SEO for Firefox, a handy extension for bloggers.
Apart from highlighting nofollow links, it can fetch you google PR, links(via google, yahoo, msn), .edu and .gov links etc. A cool plugin for the SEO-ers, it stands upto its rather cocky name. In fact, after installing this extension, I have not visited any PR-checking sites.
You can use the extension options menu to customise everything from the colour of nofollow highlight, to the pre-fetch duration of all info.
From now on, you do not have to waste your valuable time clicking View>Source and scrolling – just use this extension.