W-Shadow.com

Usually I use Opera for most of my web-surfing, but I also keep Firefox around because of the myriad useful extensions that it has. For example, if I wanted to see what PageRank a page has, or where it’s backlinks come from, I’d start up FF and use the Search Status extension for Firefox to analyze the website. Until recently I thought there was no easy way to do the same thing in Opera. Turns out there is 🙂

Initially I was only searching for a way to highlight nofollow’ed links in Opera. What I found was a full-featured plugin that could do that, and much more. The plugin is called SEObar. It’s a JavaScript file that adds a new, toolbar-like widget to the Opera web browser.

Some features :

• Highlight nofollow, noindex or external links (with different colors).
• Display the Alexa rank and PR in Opera.
• Show the number of pages indexed in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• Display the number of backlinks in Opera (by search engine).

You can download the plugin from SEObar website (it’s free).

Overall I find this SEO plugin for Opera very useful. One drawback is that it might require some fiddling to get it configured to your liking. For example, you’ll probably want to disable checking a website’s Yandex rankings (unless you’re from Russia).

And by “fiddling” I mean “hacking the source code”. It’s not always required, but for me starting up a text editor and changing some variables was simpler than figuring out why my settings weren’t retained between session. Some of the things you can do with the source are explained on the plugin’s homepage, but there are also “undocumented” features like setting bCollapsedPanel to true to make the toolbar start out in “collapsed” (minimized) mode.

Good luck 😉