Establishing if links are 'nofollow'
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Wonder if any of you guys can tell me if there is any other way to tell google links are nofollow other than in the html (ie can you tell google to nofollow every link in a subdomain or something). I'm trying to establish if a couple of links on a very high ranking site are passing me pagerank or not without asking them directly and looking silly! Within the source code for the page they are NOT tagged as nofollow at present.
Hope that all makes sense
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If you mean links to your site from some URL not on your site then you could do the following:
- Do a site:somesite.com/page to see if it is indexed, plus try and find in results
- Check the URL to you is clean - no redirects, no js, no frame etc
- Check their URL in OSE to see if there is any authority.
Otherwise if Google is not blocked from the other URL and there is no no-follow links on the page then Google is not instructed to no-follow. Therefore a small amount of link equity will pass - unless made negligible by
- The page authority is very poor
- there are multiple links on the page
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You can also use Screaming Frog to look at the linking page--look in the "Meta & Canonical" tab to see if it's nofollow or not. [It is free for a limited number of pages.]
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There is a neat tool for Firefox called "Highlight No-follow links" it does what it says and just puts a red highlight on no-follow links which is very handy. other suggestions above are really good too.
You can also use tools like Ahrefs, OSE, Majestic etc. to see no-follow links pointing towards you. Regards to the robots (meta or file) if it has "no-follow in there as seen here - http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt but this isn't completely the case. If you are worried don't be a few follow links won't do you a massive amount of hard if you're worried (not to mention you can always disavow).
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My fault for muddying the waters sorry! It's not the page I am worried about but rather the links on the page to my site. They are not tagged as nofollow in HTML but I wondered if there was a way to check on the other methods of 'nofollowing' like using the robots.txt?
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What's led you to think that, Mat?
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quick way would be to type the url into the Google and see if it appears in SEPs or if you don't want to type in the url the article name and site:example.com
If the page has been around a while you can check to see its PA in Moz - but as the last Moz update was a while ago it won't have updated any new pages (not a great solution, but its a quick and easy - not always correct).
Alternatively send me a private message / post the url on here and I will have a look for you.
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Thanks all! There is no mention of nofollow tags in the source but am still not sure if the page itself has been disallowed or nofollowed via the robots.txt file - anyone come across this before?
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SEOquake is the other one I use, besides the Mozbar, btw.
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Hi
Mozbar as mentioned above is the best tool. Its simple and easy to use.
But the source code is always the best.
Thanks
Andy
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There are a number of ways, along with the source code. Open Site Explorer will tell you, as will the Mozbar. There are also browser plugins you can use.
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If you're using Chrome, there are a few decent extensions for this. They highlight nofollow links with a red border or something similar but they aren't always 100%. Hope this helps.
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