Detecting the NoFollow Tag.

We are all aware that inbound links are key to how a search engine ranks and rates your website. Good quality inbound links will help your site or blog to gain credibility.

Unfortunately some webmasters and SEO teams misuse inbound links to make them nothing more than spam. For this reason the rel="nofollow" attribute has been created to indicate to a search engine spider not to follow the link, and therefore not index the page.

So how do you go about detecting when a site is using nofollow links?

I personally use the SearchStatus SEO tool. It has a nice option that allows you highlight no follow links:


To give you an idea of what links that are using the nofollow attribute look like here’s a description of my blog - that has been highlighted using the SearchStatus SEO tool.


For more information on the use of nofollow, check out what Matt Cutts has to say on the Google Blog