Link building is an important aspect of blogging, specially when you want to make money online with your blogs. Link building is not a tough job. You just need some patience and some hard work. You can get some good links to your blog by using various white hat SEO methods such as blog commenting, forum promotion, article marketing and link exchange. I know most of you are aware about all these stuffs and I am not going to bore you with a long article about all these things. Rather I would like to tell you about a simple Firefox add-on that will help in link building and SEO.

The add-on that I am talking about is SearchStatus. What actually it do? It displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete Rank of any domain name right within your browser. So, what’s the big deal? This add-on comes with some powerful features that you can use to spy your competitors and to improve your own blog. For example keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and many more.

You will be able to realize it’s power only after installing it on your browser (Firefox off course). Just get it from here and install it. Once it is enabled, you will see it in the bottom right of your browser. You can also change it’s position to some convenient place, from the options menu. Now browse the web as usual. When you are on a web page, it will automatically get information about the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of that particular page or domain, and displays them unobtrusively on your browser. You can enable or disable these ranks anytime.

How to use SearchStatus for link building? I am sure that you would love to get some nofollow free i.e., dofollow links. For this you need to know where you can get one. You have probably came across some dofollow blogs and even directories of dofollow blogs. But, mind it, many bloggers are cheating fellow bloggers by announcing their blogs as dofollow, when their blogs are still using nofollow on links!

So, how to know who really offers dofollow links to it’s commentators? Let’s use this Firefox add-on to get some good links. Right click on the add-on icon and select the ‘Highlight Nofollow Links” option. From now on when a web page uses nofollow on links, it will highlight the link. Go to blogs and post comments when you see no highlighting on comment links. Similarly use some brain and get good nofollow free links from relevant sources. So, with this add-on no one can cheat you about dofollow links. Just continue posting good and relevant comments on dofollow blogs and soon you will get a bunch of one way links to your blog.

In my view SearchStatus is a powerful add-on and it is a must for every blogger. I am using it for last few months and getting extremely positive results on some of my new blogs. Besides using for detecting nofollow links, I use SearchStatus to get a quick overview of a new site. It saves lots of my valuable time. If you are not using it right now, try it today. I am sure that it will become one of your favorite Firefox add-ons.

As I wrote earlier, almost all blogging software or platforms automatically adds the “nofollow” attribute to all user generated links. It is done to discourage Comment Spam in blogs. But is not friendly for all! And I know that many of us want to remove it, to show our love to the community. Today, let us talk about the Blogger blogging platform. You can easily remove the “nofollow” from your Blogger blogs (blogspot blogs), by a simple modification of your existing template. Read on to know more!

User generated links means links in comments and backlinks or trackbacks. Remove and handle your blog links responsibly. Never give spammers a chance to use your blog for spamming. Mind it, “nofollow” is for spammers and “dofollow” or “no-nofollow” is for bloggers!

How to remove nofollow from Blogger Blogs?

• First, backup your Blogger template. You can do it from the Template>Edit HTML section of your dashboard.
• After completion of your backup, check the “Expand Widgets” box in your “Edit Template” area. It will expand your template.
• Now do a search for “nofollow” in your template. Use Ctrl+F, type “nofollow” in the “Find Box” and hit enter. It will highlight the term in your template code.
• This search will show you two results - one for Backlinks and another for Comments. Look below! The results should be something like this.

rel=’nofollow’><data:backlink.title/></a> (for backlinks)

rel=’nofollow’><data:comment.author/></a> (for comments)

• Decide which you want to remove. I would recommend that you must not remove it from the backlinks. Because you don’t have control over your backlinks and they may came from spam blogs!
• To remove nofollow from blog comments, go to the highlighted section of your template code (rel=’nofollow’><data:comment.author/></a>) and simply delete the rel=’nofollow’ portion.
• Press “Save Template” button to save your blog template.

Using or not using “nofollow” depends on you. Mind it, this simple attribute helps in reducing comment spam. If you have removed “nofollow” from your blog, please moderate all your blog comments. And try not to remove “nofollow” from your backlinks.

Feel free to give your comments and suggestions on this post.

Nofollow is an attribute that can be added to links to discourage Comment Spam. It is used with the rel=”nofollow” attribute in a link. This attribute instructs Google that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. The concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005.

What official Google Blog says about nofollow?

“From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.”

Example of Nofollow link:

General Link:
<a href=”http://www.earnblogger.com/”> Earn Blogger</a>
Link with Nofollow:
<a href=”http://www.earnblogger.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Earn Blogger</a>

Blogging and Nofollow:

By default, WordPress 1.5 and above automatically assigns the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc). But, I am sure that most of the WordPress bloggers don’t know this fact! Other blogging platforms also uses it. And after the must debated Google Page Rank slap for buying and selling paid links, Google suggests that paid links must include a nofollow.

Why nofollow doesn’t work in Blogging?

• As usual spammers will continue posting spam comments with links. Because they don’t care much about the search engines. They need clicks from their links! So, I think that nofollow fails in its main task!

• Comment moderation is the most effective way to stop spam comments. When Akismet and other spam fighters caught spam comments, why we need nofollow?

• Without links or link love, there is no charm in blogging. And a link with a nofollow is not a link love!

What’s next on EarnBlogger?

I am thinking about removing nofollow from comments on this blog. Akismet will check the spam comments and I will show my love to commentators! What you think about it? Feel free to give your good comments about nofollow.