There are an ever increasing number of blogs jumping on the DoFollow train, all promising to pass on the linky goodness if you leave a comment, but how do you know they’re telling the truth?
You could of course, right-click and examine the source code of their blog, which will be hours of fun for all involved, but if you’d like a quicker way, then just install the SearchStatus extension for FireFox. This will add a configurable status bar to the bottom of your browser window, and look something like this:
As you can see it will display the Google Page Rank, Alexa score and Compete rank for the page you are currently viewing. If you then right-click on the little blue ‘q’ one of the many options is to ‘highlight nofollow links’, do that and then any web pages you view will show things like this:
There you go, links containing NoFollow are in pink - at a glance you can tell which sites are employing DoFollow and where.
‘But wait’ I hear you cry, ‘that’s a screenshot of your blog, and those comment links are nofollowed! You lied!’.
Well no, I use the LinkLove plugin which enables me to set a minimum number of comments before DoFollow is enabled. On Blog-Op it’s been set to 2 comments, as I noticed a lot of people are following DoFollow link trains, passing through the blog with ‘nice blog’ comments and never being seen again. They don’t get any link love, but leave me 2 or more comments and you will. 
I found out about this aspect of the SearchStatus extension when I was searching Andy Beards blog for his antisocial plugin. Archives and related posts are a wonderful thing.
18 users commented in " DoFollow - The Easy Way To See If Your Links Are Followed "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackNice touch and point well taken. I need to stop lurking in the feedreader and click through more often
Hello Peter, I appreciate all of my feed readers, but it’s even nicer when they step out of the shadows
That Search Status extension is also great for bumping up Alexa ratings, showing PR for webpages and tons of extra features. Everybody should use it to pass a little Alexa love around too!
I did enable doFollow/earlier, but the issue is spam/needless-comments. So I have decided to use the You-Trackback-I-Follow plugin. Its working well.You can see it in my blog.
I also notice that you reset the top commentators plugin back down to zero. Now for the long ardous journey of making it back up to the top…
Oh, wait, done
SearchStatus is very cool, as you say there’s loads more features to explore.
I’ll check that out Vinod, sounds interesting.
It resets monthly Scott, gives new visitors a chance to get up there, or existing readers the chance to spam it up
It can be a little quirky sometimes. I have noticed when opening a page in a new tab, the highlighting doesn’t always work. You will either have to reload the page or un-tick/re-tick the highlight option in the Search Status menu.
The same type of behavior is exhibited in the ChromEdit version of highlighting NoFollow links. I am assuming that Search Status is using the same method for altering the User Stylesheet.
If you view a page and the links are not highlighted — best to double check it and reload the page.
That’s interesting. You use pretty much the same system I do (I just luuuve SearchStatus .. I don’t realise how much I love it until I’m on a different PC which doesn’t have it .. or using IE) .. except for LinkLove .. might look into using that.
SearchStatus is getting rather addictive, although it can be rather depressing when you view someone elses stats against your own….
Ugh … I agree. I just compared mine against yours and you are right, I am depressed!
I did notice something interesting though. You’re ranked higher in the US, than the UK. While mine is the other way around. Go figure. Appears that our readers have something in common with beer — they like imports!
Give it time, you’ll go past me. Everybody else does
That’s rather odd - but then Firestats breaks down my last 14K visitors as
# UNITED STATES 50.88%
# UNITED KINGDOM UNITED KINGDOM 15.01%
# CANADA CANADA 4.35%
# SWITZERLAND SWITZERLAND 3.87%
# PHILIPPINES PHILIPPINES 2.51%
I have had trouble finding a large number of good UK blogs to read, so maybe this is why. I don’t know if blogging is less popular here, or I’m just looking in the wrong places.
The gap is quite narrow at Alexa for Blog-Op:
#United States 27.7%
#United Kingdom 25.9%
#Canada 10.4%
#India 9.0%
#Philippines 5.8%
Just shows you another reason on how tainted Alexa stats are.
Alexa really is worthless, apart from it’s perceived value to advertisers.
I will say though that I have a few visitors from India, and Firestats hasn’t picked them up at all.
Is there any stats package that gives something close to an accurate picture?
Curious one that.
Since Alexa resides on the client-side and your stats are on the server-side, then apparently the person(s) from India are either running through a proxy outside of the Country or surfing via an Internet connection that does not reside in India.
I meant to say the Alexa Toolbar (or SearchStatus) is on the client-side, not Alexa itself.
SearchStatus is a mandatory install for any blogger! Great stuff.
[...] Chris at Blog-Op has recently pointed out a great firefox extension that lets you do exactly that. Search Status will highlight all the links in on a page that have the rel=nofollow extension. So turn that on and browse your forums. See a page with a bunch of pink? Keep looking [...]
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