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Question About Telling if A Link is NoFollow

by melanied
7 replies
This is something I've never run into before, and it's puzzling me. I was told a certain site had "DoFollow" links. I don't really want to reveal it, because I signed up on a list to get it, and that's kind of wrong to just say it out in the forum...

At any rate, I went to the site, created a profile and put up links. I viewed the source code, and sure enough, there was no "nofollow" attribute included. However, when I use either my SEO plugin for Firefox or my Search Status plugin, the page lights up like a Christmas tree! Both of those third party extensions recognize ALL of the links on the page, including navigation, as being "NoFollow" although when you view the source code, the "NoFollow" tag is nowhere to be found.

Anyone know why this is?
#link #nofollow #question #telling
  • Profile picture of the author Dan Grossman
    It'd be easy on the site owner's end to serve a different page to browsers than search spiders (or plugins/websites that send the user-agent string of a search spider).
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  • Profile picture of the author getsmartt
    hmm...not real familiar with this concept but can you set "nofollow" globally for a web page, like you can to make all links open in a new window?
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    • Profile picture of the author Case Stevens
      You may want to look at the Meta Tags and see if they've specified noindex in the robots tag.
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    • Profile picture of the author melanied
      that's what i'm wondering. hmmm. i don't know enough about this, i guess.

      Originally Posted by getsmartt View Post

      hmm...not real familiar with this concept but can you set "nofollow" globally for a web page, like you can to make all links open in a new window?
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      *melanie

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      • Profile picture of the author daddyoh
        The only link that you should care about whether or not it's dofollow or nofollow is the one you're posting back to your site or blog.

        You're posting this link when you make a comment on a blog or as a sigfile in a forum, right?

        Well, first you check another link from someone else, even before you do anything else so you don't waste your time trying to get a link from a nofollow blog.

        Check another backlink first. Check the source code for that link in the Comment area. See if it has a nofollow tag attached to it. If it doesn't, then it's a dofollow link.

        If that's not clear, go ahead and ask some more ?'s or ask Angela.

        Good luck!
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        • Profile picture of the author Dan Grossman
          Originally Posted by daddyoh View Post

          Check another backlink first. Check the source code for that link in the Comment area. See if it has a nofollow tag attached to it. If it doesn't, then it's a dofollow link.
          Viewing the source isn't enough to tell, since they could add a nofollow attribute to the links only when it's a search spider requesting a page instead of a web browser. You'd have to emulate the spider (through user-agent unless they keep an IP list) to really know.
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          • Profile picture of the author melanied
            OK, I guess that answers my question - the forum could be only showing the "NoFollow" attribute to search engine spiders and not browsers.

            This would explain why both of my third party plugins read it as "NoFollow" when, through viewing the source code, it appears to be "DoFollow."

            So, basically, I should assume that they ARE "NoFollow" links even though the "NoFollow" attribute doesn't appear in the source code. Does that seem right?
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            *melanie

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