Best way to filter out the nofollowed links from WMT?

[MarieHaynes]

When I'm downloading links from WMT to audit them for my unnatural links clients I generally check each individual link.  If it is a nofollowed link I make a note that it is nofollowed and move on.  I'm thinking that there has to be a quicker way to find all of the nofollowed links so that I can filter them out from the beginning.  How would I do that?

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, that's right. What you'd end up with is a small list of URLs that have nofollow anywhere/somewhere on the page. If it's a big list of 5000 links and this tool can trim it down to maybe 200 having nofollow somewhere or 500 or 2000. In either case, it's a small list. Definitely not a solution to what you are looking for.

[MarieHaynes]

Hmmm...interesting.  I was just playing with screaming frog and thought I had it because you can upload a list of links and then when you export them there is a column for "nofollow", but that column means that the page is nofollowed.  That means that a nofollowed link from a meta robots follow,index page would not be flagged.

I see what you're saying about searching for nofollow on the page, but I can't see it being specific enough.  A lot of pages may have for example nofollowed comment links but my link in the article could still be followed.

[NakulGoyal]

Marie

What you could do is use Screaming Frog to crawl all the links (the combined list of ahref links and WMT and then use the custom filter to check if the domain is there, ie your link is there and  then the 2nd filter to check if there is the word nofollow anywhere on the page. It's not going to be a perfect list, because you may end up seeing a page that is linking to you, but is nofollow'ing somebody else from the same page.

But then most of the times, the regular links, they are either nofollowed or they are not. "Mostly".

I hope this helps.

[RobertFisher]

agreed and good point. (That is why we end up with soooo much SAS). 
Thanks

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks Robert.  Yes, I usually do use ahrefs and the links from there are nicely marked as nofollowed and easy to filter out.  I generally combine the links from ahrefs with the links from WMT and remove the duplicates.

I find that often there are links that are only on one list and not both.  For small sites that's not a big deal, but for a large site there may be thousands of nofollowed links that only exist on the WMT list.  I figured that if I could find a way to filter out the nofollowed links from the WMT list as well then this would save me a lot of time.

[RobertFisher]

Marie,

Have you used ahrefs.com before?

If not I think it will be very useful to you given that I know what you do. I took a small site we handle and looked at what I have in WMT and then ran it on ahrefs. On WMT we are showing 68 distinct external links. On ahrefs we are showing 62. Worst case about a ten percent difference. (For finding those 6, download both csv files and sort and should be quick. Obviously with thousands you have more work.) 
With ahrefs, you can simply sort them by nofollow, mark your GWMT data, then boom. You are real close to magic.

If you want to see it, etc. I have a conference call with a bunch of Cannucks at 0930 CDT for about 45 min. After we can talk if you call me. Oh, sorry, forgot you were up North...

Hope it helps,

Robert