Last week Google announced that it’s spiders will ignore anchor elements that have their rel attribute set to nofollow. This is a substantial move that hopefully will protect bloggers and and other website owners from comment and referrer spam.

If you would like a visual indication of links on websites that have the nofollow attribute value set, you can make a simple change to a file in Firefox.

You can simply edit your userContent.css file in your profile directory and add this simple css rule:

a[rel="nofollow"] { border-bottom: 3px dotted red !important}

The easiest way to find and edit this file is to install the clever ChromeEdit Extension.

Now everytime you browse to a page that contains a link with the nofollow attribute value, that link will have a red dotted underline!

This tip was inspired from an article I read at Andy Budd’s website.

Both comments and pings are currently closed.