Check for Do-Follows with Firefox

Have you considered how many hours you put into getting backlinks to your web pages? Worse still, do you struggle to know whether or not the backlinks you create are dofollow ones? If you’re like me you will have spent days adding your sites to different directories and putting sneaky little references to them into message boards, forums and social networking sites. Backlink creation must be the most boring part of being a webmaster. When the time to create a few more backlinks rears its ugly little head I start looking for other things to do; anything but create backlinks. I absolutely hate the repetitiveness of it; and the whole idea of it is made worse because I’m not always sure that the backlinks I create are dofollow ones.

A couple of days ago I learned a new trick: to edit Firefox to highlight nofollow links.

Don’t misunderstand, backlink creation is still a chore thought more painful than the prospect of someone jumping on your gonads (although some people do like that); this, however, adds the element of a very friendly nurse into the equation so it’s a damn sight more pleasurable than it was.

The trick is to create a custom CSS value for the nofollw attribute of the HTML <a> tags. Don’t worry if that sounds like gobbledygook, you don’t need to know what it means you just need to know what to copy and paste and to where to put it.

The Firefox folder in your computer contains your profile folder and a subfolder called Chrome. To get Firefox to alert you to nofollow links within a webpage you must edit or create a file called userContent.css with an instruction for Firefox to display nofollow links in a way that makes them stand out.

Instructions

1. Browse to the directory user/.mozila/firefox/*profile*/chrome (where *profile* represents your profile folder. Windows users should just look for Mozilla/Firefox/*Profile*/Chrome)
2. Create a file called userContent.css. If this file already exists then use that instead of creating a new one.
3.  Paste the following lines into it:

   a[rel*="nofollow"] {
   color: #000000;
   border: 1px dashed black;
   background: #ffffff;
   }

4. Save then close the document.
5. Restart Firefox.

From now on, whenever you see a link that has a nofollow attribute it will have a black dashed box around it, white background and black writing so you will be better able to decide whether or not to place a backlink.

Here’s another tip: install the Firefox plugin called Autofill Forms and set-up your default form fill data with the details for your backlink so that Firefox can fillout most of most directory submission forms for you.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2009

Sharing is caring!