Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer and part of their quality control team, gave a useful tip on modifying Firefox to make the “NoFollow� attribute visible. There is controversy regarding the “NoFollow� feature. At the same time it is being used by webmasters and bloggers. With any feature there are those who are going to abuse it. Everyone knows those people who are afraid of “linking out to other sites�. This new feature will quickly display who is using �No Follow� tags and you can decide if it is used in a principled way.

Consider this for a minute. You (or our friendly spiders) visits a page and finds that 90% of the links use the NoFollow Attribute. This is probably not a natural use of the tag and a neighborhood to avoid. Who knows what other tactics they are utilizing. It is a possible warning sign to more aggressive manipulation of the Search Engines.

Little do most people realize is that by aggressively using features such as “NoFollow� they are outing themselves to the Search Engines. Consider this scenario. A spider finds a sub-page of a site with a large number of outbound links. It exceeds a min threshold for normal NoFollow tag use. Site/Page is flagged for review…

Following up on Matt’s suggestion Chris Raw of Quirk.co.za added a “Highlight NoFollow Links� to his Search Status toolbar. The “Search Status� toolbar is one of the most useful add-ons to the FireFox browser for anyone working on SEO/SEM. Other feature of this toolbar include backlinks, indexed pages, robot.txt, whois and archieve.org.