Detecting ‘rel=nofollow’ (FireFox)
This guide can be used to detect the use of the attribute rel=”nofollow” on Firefox browsers in any computer, whether it is on a PC, Linux or Macintosh computer. The rel=”nofollow” attribute can be highlighted in your Firefox browser by adding one line to your userContent.css file. The userContent.css file is used to change the appearance of web pages in Firefox. This step by step guide will show you how to modify the userContent.css file to show the rel=”nofollow” links highlighted in red.
How to detect the attribute rel=”nofollow” using the Firefox browser:
- Quit Firefox and go to the following directory (NB xxx is a random string of eight characters):
- For PCs using Windows XP / 2000:
C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx.default\chrome - For PCs using Windows 95 / 98 / ME:
C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx.default\chrome - For Linux computers:
~/.mozilla/firefox/xxx.default/chrome - For Macintosh (MAC OS X) computers:
~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Firefox/
Profiles/xxx.default/chrome
- For PCs using Windows XP / 2000:
- There should be an example file called userContent-example.css, rename this file to userContent.css (remove -example)
- Open up your new userContent.css file and add the following line:
a[rel~="nofollow"] { border: thin dashed firebrick! important; background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200)! important; } - Save and close the file
Testing Firefox to see rel=”nofollow” highlighted in red.
- Open Firefox and visit Attribute rel=”nofollow”
- Firefox should automatically highlight 4 links in red. These are the links that are using the attribute rel=”nofollow”. See below image:
Don’t have Firefox? Download Firefox - it’s free and comes in many languages for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux i686. Learn how to customize your userContent.css and userChrome.css files for FireFox.
This is a nifty little piece of advice- very useful!
however, it does make some pages a little too ‘pink’ for my liking - is there any way of turning this on and off easily?
Tom
Comment by Tom — May 21, 2007
[…] That said, I believe that all users should be able to recognize these links as being problematic (or untrusted) at first glance. The more advanced, web-savvy users will sometimes have tools installed or special settings which highlight links with “rel=nofollow”, the normal user does not. If a link is marked as being problematic / untrusted for search engines, the user should see that as well — it’s nothing more than the Google Webmaster Guideline “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users (…)”. It is deceiving to show users a normal link and at the same time tell search engines that you really don’t want to link there! In my opinion, if the link is not good enough, the user should be informed. There are two ways to do that. My favorite solution would be for browsers to automatically highlight these kinds of links on all sites. However, I doubt that will happen any time soon… […]
Pingback by Adding “rel=nofollow” markup to your site » johnmu.com — July 24, 2007
Thx for this info
I was have plugin to show nf links
but dont work well (sometimes shows, sometimes not)
Now is ok, and i can make own .css for nofollow
@Tom you cannot turn on/off but you can remove ping background from css
border is enoughf for me
Comment by mosh — November 29, 2007