(Grease)monkeying about with nofollow
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
My latest toy is a user script to strike through rel="nofollow" links.
I'm curious to see how widely used they are.
Update:
As it says in the comments, Scott Johnson has corrected an oversight of mine to do with multiple values for the rel attribute. Why not try his updated version.
7 Comments:
My favorite twisted use of nofollow so far is by Google-partner answers.com - they nofollow all their links to search partners, including Google, they nofollow their contractually-required links to people like Houghton Mifflin and the license link to the GFDL for Wikipedia articles, they nofollow their links to their own Privacy and TOS pages (because who wants their boilerplate coming up in any sort of search?).
That's outrageous.
They're like a big Pagerank sink.
They even nofollow the people like the WSJ who are recommending them.
There's one extremely common case where this does not work: WordPress blogs. I know this is the case with WordPress 1.5, but I'm not sure about older versions. The rel tag has the value "external nofollow" by default. This breaks your user script. I would suggest grabbing the value of the rel attribute and checking for the occurrence of nofollow within the string.
Gareth,
I patched your script to work with rel tags containing other values in addition to nofollow. A writeup is on my blog.
Scott,
I only noticed that you could have multiple attributes inside rel tags after I posted.
Looks like you've saved me the trouble of fixing it!
At some point I might look at styling the various rels differently but it might just become a confusing mess.
I don't get why you wouldn't just use CSS?
Although interesting usage :)
I have moved domains. Just to keep things straight, here's the new URL for the blog posting where I talked about this user script: http://full-speed.org/archives/2005/03/02/greasemonkey_vs_nofollow.php
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