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Posts Tagged ‘Firefox’

Building links to your site, the core portion of SEO work, is more than a little tricky. You have to find good sites to get links from. You have to convince them that they should create those links, or create high quality and relevant content for them that contains your link . Beyond that, you will need to avoid land mines known as “NoFollows.”

What are NoFollow Links

There is a property called “NoFollow” that can added to the header code or to the individual links on the page. This is added by terribly mean webmasters, but it’s also added for a good reason. The amount of “link juice,” or the search engine assistance brought by the inbound links that point to your page, is divided up among all the outgoing links, whether those links are external (to other sites) or internal (to your own site). In order to get the most benefit out of that link juice, many webmasters use NoFollow on links that are pointing to outside pages. While a little selfish, this understandable practice is seen as the status quo.

How You Can Spot Them

The normal way to find these links would be to open the code of the site, take a look at their headers to see if everything is declared as NoFollow, and look at the individual links to see if these have been weighed down with rel=”NoFollow” tags. Luckily, there is a simpler way to do this. If you use Firefox, then you can use a plugin called “Search Status” to automatically highlight NoFollows. If you’re a Chrome addict, the “NoFollow” extension will outline all these booby traps. If you’re using Internet Explorer, get with the program and download either Firefox or Chrome.

Once you know how to spot them, you can narrow down your efforts by focusing on sites that don’t use this harmful tag. This way you won’t waste your time pushing for a link from a site that wouldn’t do you any good or creating content for a site at no benefit to yourself.