Affiliate friendly Firefox plugins
Like many, since the launch of FireFox back in Jan 2005 I haven’t touched another browser since. Part of the reason behind this is the sheer diversity and quality of plug ins out there that enhance the standard features and make my day to day working life a whole lot easier. As many of these plugins are affiliate/seo related I thought I’d share with you those which I use on a regular basis and help spread the good word.
Search Status
My absolute favourite. Jam packed full of tools I use daily, I honestly can’t imagine my browser without it. Sitting in the bottom right of my screen this little beauty instantly shows me Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank at the blink of an eye. In doing so you can instantly see both the link importance and the traffic importance of any website. Click the little blue @ sign and it reveals all sorts of goodies: domain whois, indexed pages and back links (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) and keyword density amongst others.
Live HTTP Headers
Next up is Live HTTP Headers. In nut shell this plugin (once activated) allows me to record and track the different URLs and variables that often flash before my eyes in the status bar. This is particularly useful when dealing with affiliate URL’s that have been masked or hidden. By slowing down the whole process HTTP Headers allows me to back track, dig deep and find the info I’m looking for. In this instance, it’s the ID for the affiliate I’m looking to contact.
WebDeveloper Extension
More suited to the Webmasters and developers amongst us the WebDeveloper plugin installs an additional toolbar with a variety of useful functions to play with. I won’t list all the functions, needless to say there are absolutely loads. My favourite thing about this plugin is the ability to override style sheet elements with your own customised version. Why would you want to do this? Well for example by using the following code you can instantly highlight with a red dashed border any instances where the website is using H1 tags.
h1 {
border: 2px dashed red;
}
You might like to do the same for nofollow tags. It’s certainly a lot faster than sifting through pages of code.
Site Advisor
One for the more security conscious amongst us, this plug in displays warning signs in red yellow and green next to every link and paid advert in the search engines. If you are worried that you are about to click on a unscrupulous link, be infected with spyware, or get spammed to death then this will warn you ahead of time. If you’re a webmaster it’s also worth checking to see that your websites doesn’t fall into the “bad boy” category. Just take a look at the example screen shot below for the search term “screen saver” – infected PC anybody?
Other noteworthy plugins:
Adsense Notifier
Displays your Adsense earnings on the statusbar.
Commission Junction plugin
Fellow affiliate and blogger Fraser Edwards has kindly shared a tool he developed that logs in to the commission junction affiliate network and reports back your latest stats and commission balance. If only he’d make one for TradeDoubler, hint hint :)
Popularity: 6% [?]
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TD plugin will hopefully be available soon :)
Seems like we are already using exactly the same set of extensions but this is a great post for those who might not have discovered them yet.