How To Add Nofollow Attribute In Your Blogroll (WordPress)

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March 11, 2007
In WordPress
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How To Add Nofollow Attribute In Your Blogroll (WordPress)

Keeping a long list of links in your blogroll is pretty good to promote your readers, friends, or websites but it might harm your Google PR. So, if you want to add Nofollow attribute in your WordPress blogroll, follow these steps:

Open your site’s file manager and edit this file: /wp-admin/edit-link-form.php

Find:

	 < ?php _e('friendship') ?>

Add the following code under the “td” section:


 /> < ?php _e('nofollow') ?>

That’s it. Save the file and check your WordPress Administration panel. Now if you go to the “Blogroll” tab, you’ll find an option to add “nofollow” attribute in your blogroll links.

Enjoy!

apotheon

How exactly does linking to other weblogs in a blogroll hurt your pagerank?

Avinash

Good question, Ren!
You may want to read the article “How a Blogroll can kill your Pagerank” posted by Andy Beard on his blog.

Please note that every SEO takes “nofollow link attribute” pretty differently. If you already don’t read the SEO Book blog, I’ll recommend to visit SEO Book and read more about nofollow attribute. :)

In my opinion, keeping 20 or 50 links in your blogroll is OK but there are many people who keep hundreds of links in their blogrolls. A huge link list in your blogroll does no good for your blog.

apotheon

Ahh, got it now. It’s talking about massive lists of links to outside websites that will never reciprocate and tend to suck readers away. That’s not really what I think of when I think “blogroll” — I think of a “blogroll” as weblogs that I follow, and obviously I can’t follow that many at one time, so the number stays smallish. I also don’t tend to follow many weblogs from A-listers that will never know I’m alive, because I find that their content is no better than the high-quality content of carefully chosen webloggers a bit closer to my own level of traffic and pagerank, so communities develop rather than merely great masses of link tributaries feeding into the A-list river.

I get a richer, more rewarding weblogging experience than I would with many one-way sycophantic relationships. Conveniently, this ensures that I won’t just feed pagerank to strangers and lose readers, without even having to make a conscious choice to that effect. When read your comment that a blogroll could lose you pagerank, I wondered if Google was doing some kind of statistical correction by devaluing pagerank on sites that have too many outgoing links in one place, or something like that.

Anyway, thanks for clearing that up for me. I can rest easy knowing that I don’t have to cut off my friends’ Google juice to prevent the destruction of my own pagerank.

Andy Beard

Thanks for the link, although I wouldn’t have known about it due to the nofollow on links in your comments – thankfully I have some Google alerts setup as well.

I don’t class myself as an SEO, but I have seen the harm blogrolls can do to people who don’t think about what they are doing or have technical knowledge. Lots of stuff I write about is based on books such as Revenge of the Mininet and the free follow on about Dynamic linking by Leslie Rhode.

Many blog templates include the blogroll on every page, not only the ones you normally see, but also all the duplicate content pages.

I have seen blogs where 95% of the links on single pages (the ones that have a permalink for you posts) are external links

Apotheon your blogroll isn’t on every page which is a good thing, but it does appear on pages such as http://sob.apotheon.org/index.php?paged=2

There are improvements I would make, such as making you tag pages only have internal links to related tags, and include tag links on your posts along with links to related content.

It is true that my way of optimizing blogs is not universally accepted, but SEOs don’t know the inner workings of Google algorithms, and sometimes totally opposite site structures from the norm, which place emphasis in a totally different direction can rank extremely well.
Conventional wisdom is to get rid of all duplicate content pages.

My theories are a bit like a library – author indexes, category indexes, latest releases and top 100 are all useful for an end user to find content and relate one topic to another.

Avinash

You are welcome, Ren aka apotheon! :)

Avinash

My Pleasure, Andy! :)
Thanks for your insightful comment regarding the use of nofollow link attribute in huge blogrolls. I’ve read your article and the sidebar2 idea sounds good for the people who don’t want to use nofollow.

apotheon

Thanks, Andy. Frankly, I’ve just been making sure that the WordPress template I’m using (with modifications) doesn’t completely screw me, and not worrying about it past that. Ultimately, I’m likely to roll my own weblog software that suits my needs more exactly, anyway — so I’m not too motivated to invest a lot of time tweaking every detail to my exactly specifications. I’ll certainly keep your recommendations in mind as I design the replacement, but for now I’m unlikely to implement them.

I’ll also probably mine your weblog for more ideas than just those related to the blogroll, Andy. It looks like there’s some useful information there.

Matthew Bennett

thank you very much for that tip, just what I was looking for to finish off some major changes to The Big Chorizo.. Saludos from Spain!

Avinash

My pleasure, Matthew! I’m glad to know it helped.

Thanks for stopping by!

Garry Conn

I just wanted to drop you a quick comment to tell you thank you for providing the code. I found your blog on Google. I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to do this. Again, thanks for the easy and very important fix.

Avinash

You are welcome, Garry! :) It’s nice to know that this post helped.

Thanks for stopping by!

Garry Conn

You are welcome… I guess we can thank Google, because that is how I found your article. lol

Not many people understand the importance of nofollow, in fact I didn’t either until recently. Now, I have to go back and convenience all my DOFOLLOW readers what I have recently discovered. That’s not going to be an easy task. :(

I might just let it be… but make no mistake, using nofollow is now very important to me. :)

SEO Brasil

I was looking for something like that. I wanted to avoid using another plug-in, just simple and intelligent coding. Thanks a lot!!! Already implemented and will monitor any changes on my PR.
Cheers

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