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NoFollow Question

by Matt Barrington
3 replies
Hey Warriors, quick question for you.

How can I tell if a blog or forum has the "Nofollow" attribute enabled?

When I googled it, it said to check the robots.txt file by typing "http://www.examplewebsite.com/robots.txt" into my browser, but I keep getting the old "This page doesn't exist" error. Am I doing something wrong here? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
#nofollow #question
  • Profile picture of the author KathyK
    IN addition to checking for robots.txt to see if there's a universal nofollow...

    View source on the blog (where there are comments with links) or forum (in a sub-forum with posts that have links in them) and do a text search for rel="nofollow" or just nofollow - if you see it in their links, they are nofollow. If you don't see it, they aren't.

    A lot of sites don't have a robots.txt - so you aren't doing anything wrong to get a 404 - they just don't have one.
    Signature

    Cheers,
    Kathy

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    • Profile picture of the author Krisism
      Just like Kathy states below there are a few ways to set the no-follow tag onto links.

      1. Robots.txt universal index block (as page "doesnt exist" neither will links from it)
      2. In meta tags in <head> section of pages using page-wide no-follows and no-index tags.
      3. On the link itself with a rel=nofollow class added.

      These three would cover all bases but you can spend a fair bit of time looking for them especially on javascript heavy pages and dense code. When I am looking through internal structures for no-follow links I use the SEOBook toolbar to highlight no-follow links for me. This is a quick way to get a glimpse of follow/no follow links - though if you want to be 100% sure you will still need to take a quick peek in the robots.txt if they have one.

      Hope this helps - just wanted to add on to Kathy's description and note the SEOBook toolbar (lots of incredible features if your into seo).

      Cheers,
      Kris
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  • Profile picture of the author Matt Barrington
    Wow, thank you guys. Sure appreciate the info!
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