Links, links and more links is an important issue for most people who are interested in improving their website or blog’s search engine ranking. Previously, I have written about the 7 Blogging Mistakes That Bloggers do When Building Links. You might want to check it out and learn how to optimize the links you build to your blog.One of the most common ways that bloggers employ to build links to their blog is to leave comments on other blogs with a link to their own. Normally, this should work but there are webmasters and bloggers that adhere to a ‘NOFOLLOW’ link policy for some reasons. This simply means that the link you’ve created to your blog from a blog that implements a ‘nofollow’ links policy is not at all going to boost your page ranking. If your purpose of leaving a comment is to improve your blog’s PR, then I must say you’ve failed. In order for the links to be counted, the links you’ve created for your blog should be a ‘Follow’ link.
The question now is, how do you know whether a blog or a website has a ‘NOFOLLOW LINK POLICY’?
One alternative to doing this is to open the source code and search for “nofollow” word.
1. Open the page on your favorite browser.
2. Right Click on page, and on floating menu click on “View Page source”
3. On the source search for “nofollow” word.
For your convenience however, I suggest that you download Search Status Plugin to be included in your Mozilla Firefox browser. Once you are able to download Search Status Plugin to your firefox browser, you will be able to detect whether the blog or website you have visited implements a nofollow link. If you are not using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser, you can download it for free at Mozilla’s homepage. After you’ve downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox, you can now download Search Status Plugin. Always remember to install the latest version for optimum benefits.
What is Search Status Plugin and How do you use it?
Search Status Plugin allows you to see the Page Rank and Alexa Rank of the website or blog you are visiting. It also allows you to identify the part of the website or blog that do not follow links, gives a report of the number of links (follow and nofollow), check meta tags, show indexed pages etc.
Here’s how the plugin looks like once you have installed it as an additional tool to your Mozilla Firefox web browser. The tool can be found at the lower right corner of the browser.
When this screen shot was taken, I was browsing copyblogger.com. With the Search Status plugins the Page Rank and Alexa Rank of copyblogger is revealed. In the actual page, if you place your mouse pointer at the Page Rank icon or at the Alexa Ranking, the rank will be shown. Copyblogger has a page rank of 6/10 and an Alexa ranking of 7,561.
The “Q Icon” besides Page Rank is the tool that you can use to highlight the nofollow link of a website or a blog you have visited. To do this, simply right click on the Q icon and choose ‘Highlight Nofollow Link’. The links on the page will automatically be highlighted. Let’s take the case of Copyblogger. After I’ve clicked on highlight nofollow link, here’s how it looks like.
From the screen shot, you can say that leaving comments at Copyblogger.com is not really useful to boost your page ranking because it implements a nofollow link on its comments. In the above picture, the links to the blogs of those who have left comments were highlighted in pink. This means search engines do not follow the links when they crawl Copyblogger.com.
Using the same icon (Q icon), I can obtain a link report of the page I am browsing. The link report provides information on the page’s external and internal links, follow and nofollow links. Here’s the link report I have obtained for Copyblogger.com using the Q Icon.
Imagine the convenience of knowing the page rank and whether a blog or website implements a follow link without the incovenience of doing it separately. That’s a lot of time saved don’t you think?
I’ll leave the rest of the features for your to discover.
I hope you’ve found this post useful. Your comment is appreciated. Thank you.
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