Matt Cutts from Google last week posted a handy tip on his new blog about how, in Firefox, to emphasize links that have the rel=nofollow attribute, which negates the vote that the web page is making by linking.

Sometimes people will say they have got a reciprocal link back to you but in actuality they have stuck a nofollow attribute on to the link so that it doesn’t actually count.

You can expose such sneakiness in Firefox using Matt’s handy tip. It involves creating a user defined Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that overrides a website’s own CSS.

Of course the more prevalent use of the nofollow attribute is to discount links that you have not posted on your site yourself and therefore cannot vouch for, such as in your guest book, or in your blog comments, or on your discussion forum.

When setting this up, you may want to try out a variation of Matt’s solution, submitted by a commentor, that doesn’t modify the original styles but instead adds a blinking exclamation point next to the nofollow’ed link.