I mentioned before that many blogs and indeed directories use “nofollow” on outbound links to prevent link juice flowing away from their site. These are quite easy to spot in the HTML code by looking at the link code to see if there is a rel=”nofollow”. However, this may be quite daunting for those not very familiar with HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and luckily there is an easier way. First you need to install Firefox then you need to install this SEO extension from for Firefox Aaron Wall. Once you have this installed you will notice that the link to Aaron’s site is highlighted in red - this is how his SEO extension shows nofollow links.

Ok, so this is great for finding RELEVANT blogs, forums and directories that will pass link juice to your site, but how can you use it on your site. If you have any internal links that do not convey any meaning e.g. Read more, more, continue, next, numbers, dates, home you can make them “nofollow”. You need to make sure that you don’t orphan any important pages i.e. make sure that the search engines can get to these page. One way of achieving this is to create a site guide in the footer with more meaningful links. For example, the “Home” in the menu on this site is “nofollow”, but there is a link in the footer to the homepage using the following anchor text “The Hip Zone” which is not much better I know but you get the point. There might also be pages that don’t have much content that can safely be orphaned, such as you privacy and terms and conditions page. (That reminds me I need to create these for this site).