How to Check For NoFollow/DoFollow
In the introduction to dofollow and nofollow, we looked at what these terms mean, and we saw reasons why one would want to do either. What I want to do now, is look at a couple ways you can check to see if a link is dofollow or nofollow, and hence whether a site would classify as dofollow/nofollow.
The first way I will look at is the manual way. It is not difficult at all, but if you had to do this a lot, it could get tedious and time consuming. Nevertheless, it is good to know how to check at will without needing any extra tools. Here is how:
1. Take any website you want to check for. You want to check the links in the sections where visitors can make contributions. So for example, let us say you were checking a blog. You’d most likely want to check the comments section. Try finding comments that already have links in them. The link will most likely be in the name of the poster, or sometimes in the body of the comment.
2. Once you have found a post/page with the links you want to check for, right click on the page, and click the option to view source. This will open a window, maybe a notepad screen or another browser window, with the source code of the page. Don’t worry if you can’t understand the code. You are interested only in finding the source of the link.
3. In your source code window, select the Edit menu option at the top of the window. Then choose Find. What you’ll be looking for is the text of the link you want to check, or at least some portion of it that will take you to the link code. So for eg. if you were to look for this link about Unique Web Traffic , you could search for “unique web traffic”.
4. When you have found the text you’re searching for, you will see some html code surrounding the text you searched for. So if we use the example link mentioned above, we would see the following code:
<a href="https://learningstuff.necubed.com/2009/08/16/unique-web-traffic-to-your-website-you-can-get-it/"> link about Unique Web Traffic</a>
The <a href= code is what designates a link. The part we want to check for, is the tag, “rel”. If this were a nofollow link, it would have “rel=nofollow”. For eg.
<a href=”https://learningstuff.necubed.com/2009/08/16/unique-web-traffic-to-your-website-you-can-get-it/” rel=nofollow> link about Unique Web Traffic</a>
Since it doesn’t, then we know it is a dofollow link. It is as simple as that.
As you can see, although this is not a complicated process, it can get tedious if you have to do this often. So I will introduce a another way to check whether a link is dofollow/nofollow. The second way is by installing the SEO for Firefox extension. Yes, I am suggesting you use Firefox if you’re not already. Please, just abandom Internet Explorer.
With this plugin, once you install it and turn it on, all nofollow links will be highlighted for any web page you’re viewing. So for example, on this page, you should see the Register link on the left sidebar highlighted in red. That is because it is a nofollow link. Note that this plugin has a lot of other uses too, but that is for another post.
So now you’re equipped to determine which sites are nofollow and dofollow, you can go forth and check which sites suit your purposes.