When Seo For Firefox Needs To Be Turned Off

Today I’m going to write about a time when you should be turning off your SEO for Firefox tool.

I first noticed this anomaly while working on my own blog, and again when working on a client’s site who uses Drupal. (hey, they already had Drupal installed. Nothing wrong with it, but if you ask me I prefer other technologies)

Alright, back to the subject. For those of you who aren’t familiar with SEO for Firefox, it’s a Mozilla Firefox add-on that every SEO professional and enthusiast should have, along with SEO Quake. It’s a free resource. Read this post first, then after you subscribe to my blog (hint, hint), you can get yours here.

So, while writing my post about the DoubleClick purchase, I used <rel=”nofollow”> on some of my links cause I didn’t feel like giving Google any of my precious link authority :). (If you don’t know about “nofollow” tags, this post explains it, but finish reading first!!)

To add the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to my link tag, I had to switch to the “Code” tab in my post editor.

Now that I was in there, I added the attribute as you can see below:

Then I switched back to the “Visual” tab to finish up my blog post. I switched and notice that my SEO for Firefox was picking up that link as a “nofollow”, and highlighting it red as it likes to do with all “nofollows”. I thought: “Alright, you go nofollow! I mean… ummm… You are actually going nowhere, you’re a nofollow..” It acted as a confirmation that it was in place.

So I continued on with my post and published it. Once it was all done, I checked the live site on all browsers I have installed on my machine, just to be extra anal. Firefox first, duh! Check… Next was Explorer… Check.. umm.. Wait! Something wasn’t right there. I don’t have SEO for Firefox installed on my Explorer and somehow it was picking it up and highlighting it.

I thought to myself… Weird! Specially because that was the only nofollow on my page being picked up. Very weird indeed! What to do? I went back to the code. Logged back into my admin area, went into my “Manage” tab and picked this post.

Everything looked ok, I still didn’t get it.. So I went into the “Code” tab and lo! and behold! Well, see for yourself:

Did you see what happened there? You probably did, but just in case you didn’t, I’ll help you out. When I first added the <rel=”nofollow”> attribute to the link tag, I had my SEO for Firefox turned on. Then I switched to “Visual” mode and the SEO for Firefox did what it does best, it highlighted the link red because it saw a “nofollow” on the code behind it. When it did that, my post editor read it as if I had highlighted that word in red myself, so it added the extra code <style=”background-color: #ff0000″> into the link tag. The end result was a link with the red highlight in the code, not something I wanted at all.

From that point on, I learned to turn my SEO for Firefox tool OFF before working on a post

I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, please don’t be shy, comment, share, subscribe!

Til next time!