I’ve recently changed back to FireFox to my default browser preference because of its invaluable extensions (sorry Safari). One extension that I use is an SEO tool. One of the features of this extension is that it highlights in red the a href links that have the nofollow attribute defined. Setting a nofollow tag basically tells a Google crawlers to not crawl through pass credit through that link. One specific use case is in Wordpress comments, where nofollow tags are set to the commentator’s url. This prevents spammers from simply commenting for PageRank.

Installing this SEO tool gives me a fun perspective of how websites work. YCombinator’s Hacker News is my favorite reads of the day. The audience is a relatively young crowded dedicated to startups and programming. It’s a great source for technology news as Digg and Reddit are mainstreaming. In the mages, the red highlights been nofollow links. As articles get more points, they become legit.

Below is a screenshot of the the top posts.

Here is what the up and coming posts look like.

Update: The SEO for Firefox tool I use can be found here.

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