'No Follow' and 'Do Follow' links when using WordPress plugins
-
Hi all
I hope someone can help me out with the following question in regards to 'no follow' and 'do follow' links in combination with WordPress plugins.
Some plugins that deal with links i.e. link masking or SEO plugins do give you the option to 'not follow' links. Can someone speak from experience that this does actually work??
It's really quite stupid, but only occurred to me that when using the FireFox add on 'NoDoFollow' as well as looking at the SEOmoz link profile of course, 95% of my links are actually marked as FOLLOW, while the opposite should be the case. For example I mark about 90% of outgoing links as no follow within a link masking plugin.
Well, why would WordPress plugins give you the option to mark links as no follow in the first place when they do in fact appear as follow for search engines and SEOmoz? Is this a WordPress thing or whatnot? Maybe they are in fact no follow, and the information supplied by SEO tools comes from the basic HTML structure analysis. I don't know...
This really got me worried. Hope someone can shed a light. All the best and many thanks for your answers!
-
Thanks for your reply Moosa!
The author of the WP plugin has responded to me with the following:
Pretty Link does send a nofollow/noindex in the http header of the request (you won't see it in the HTML because its sent with the http request).
I don't think he's making things up, at the same time I'm not code savvy enough to confirm it. What do you think? One or the other way, I will also follow the hard coded no follow from now on.
Just to wrap it up. If by any chance, all outgoing links are still FOLLOW, I believe it would be the wrong move and suspicious to search engines, if I went out now NO following all links that there are in the site. Correct?
Thanks again for your help!
-
Wordpress is awesome but obviously there are tons of shitty plug-in that can kill your website big time like you said... from the explanation you have provided in your questions... It clearly seems like the plugin is not working for you...
Personally, I always check links if they are no follow or do follow from SEOmoz toolbar and don’t really use any plugin for no following any link... I would prefer to manually add a single line of code in the page/post instead of using any plugin... this will kill any problem and give me the 100% result.
The single line code for no following any link is -
Hi David
Thanks for your answer! Well, it's only outgoing affiliate links that shall not pass on link juice. All internal links do follow. Well, one of the masking plugins is Pretty Link, so not an unknown one when it comes to WordPress plugins (the actual tick box description for not following a link says "Add a nofollow and noindex to this link's http redirect header". Not sure what redirect header is supposed to mean.
No, I haven't added the nofollow manually as I though the plugin would sort it out
Silly question, but can I assume that a no follow link is ONLY REALLY no follow when you can tell by the actual source code (i.e. when you check the source code of a website and a link clearly states rel=nofollow) or may there be some robots.txt or scripts going on in the background that tell search engines regardless??
The more I think about it, the more confusing it seems to get.
Thanks for the answers!
-
Not sure why you would want to nofollow 95% of your outgoing links, might throw up some red flags, but sounds like the plugin you are using to nofollow may not actually be working. Have you tried adding the html manually to the links?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Using "Div's" to place content at top of HTML
Is it still a good practice to use "div's" to place content at the top of the HTML code, if your content is at the bottom of the web page?
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Wordpress migration
Hi i wonder if anyone can help. I have migrated my site to a new host, with a temp domain name i.e., http://www.test1.com The current site is still live on another host with the domain name http://www.perfecttest.com The temp site is now ready to do live. but we want to use the domain perfecttest.com a. What is the process to move the domain to the new host and to change the test1.com to be perfecttest.com. I kneo that we need to change the domain perfecttest.com nameserver to point to the new host but i am sure there must be more that need to be done inorder to not have issues. Your help will be grateful T
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
100's of Footer Links... what is the safe play?
Hello, One of my clients wants to know what you guys think is the best solution. He sells 100's of templates a month that have a footer link on it pointing to our homepage. Anchor links are "keyword" & "Brand Name" Some are different than others. Do we update the templates so those are no-follow links in the footer? Do we just make all the links to: Brand Name and have them follow? I understand Brand Name is the business name but I am also afraid that Brand name is so close to the money making keyword in the industry and Google might think we are trying to game the system. Looking for your expert opinions!
Technical SEO | | MoosaHemani0 -
Internal Linking
Hello there, I own a "how to" website with 1000+ articles, and the number of articles is growing every day. Often some articles are easier to understand if I link a certain step to an article that was written before, because that article explains the step in more detail. Should I use "read here/read more" or the "title of the article I'm referring to" as anchor text? When is internal linking too much? Should I use nofollow?
Technical SEO | | FisnikSylka0 -
Google is somehow linking my two sites that aren't linked! HELP
Good Morning... In my Google webmaster account it is showing an increase of backlinks between one site i own to the other.... This should not happen, as there are no links from one site to the other. I have thoroughly checked many pages on the new site to see if i can find a backlink, but i can't. Does anyone know why this is showing like this (google now shows 50,000 links from one site to the other).. Can someone please take a look and see if you can find any link from one to the other... original site : http://goo.gl/JgK1e new site : http://goo.gl/Jb4ng Please let me know why you guys think this is happening or if you were actually able to find a link on the new site pointing back to the old site... thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Too Many On-Page Links
Hello. My Seomoz report this week tells me that I have about 500 pages with Too Many On-Page Links One of the examples is this one: https://www.theprinterdepo.com/hp-9000mfp-refurbished-printer (104 links) If you check, all our products have a RELATED products section and in some of them the related products can be UP to 40 Products. I wonder how can I solve this. I thought that putting nofollow on the links of the related products might fix all of these warnings? Putting NOFOLLOW does not affect SEO?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Wordpress for e-commerce
What plugin should I use to make a webshop taht is good for seo as well? Should I use wordpress indeed or should i use some other open source CMS?
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
Should I have a 'more' button for links?
I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0