Recently Googleblogger Matt Cutts talked about the nofollow-tag. While what he reported was about 90% of what a Google rep emailed me several months ago, what immediately caught my attention was a screenshot he had posted. I took the liberty of cropping the interesting section of it:
This gives quite an interesting insight into what Firefox extensions Matt uses.
- Greasemonkey – which is kind of interesting since there have been incidents in the past when Google “sabotaged” certain Greasemonkey scripts
- Search Status – an extension I use myself which offers certain webmaster features, among others Google PageRank and Alexa rank display.
Interestingly enough, Matt obviously seems to only use the PageRank function and has switched off the Alexa rank. I can tell this from the position of the PageRank display, which is the default position for the Search Status extension. I pretty much assume that he is using the Google toolbar as well. Maybe he wants to check the Search Status results against the original.
I personally have switched off the Google PR and only use the Alexa display of Search Status. - No clue what the grey orb is…
- ProxySwitcher – I recently swapped it for FoxyProxy which has a silly name but more functionality.
I can’t stop repeating how important proxies are for professional webmasters. Up to my knowledge it’s the only reliable way to circumvent geotargeting. And despite the official way proclaimed by Google I use it to check AdWords for different regions.
I can only speculate for what Matt uses it. Probably to disguise to sites that he’s coming from Google. I often wondered if Google had a general proxy for their employees which makes the come from an unsuspicious IP address. I would have thought that it was more centralized though, and not up to the discretion of each employee. But probably they have both.
I’m looking forward to seeing more screenshots from Matt’s browser.