This article will present simple guide to add nofollow attribute to all the external links in your WordPress Blog. There are two types of links that are significant to the SEO process of your Blog i.e. dofollow and nofollow links. There are many plugin available which can e used to add nofollow attribute to the links and you can also do it manually. First of all let’s see the difference between both types of links.
What is the difference between “dofollow” and “nofollow” links?
NoFollow Links are not followed by the search engines or it can be defined as if you made a link nofollow then it tell Google Bot and other search engines not to follow them. In normal practice links that are not trusted by us or linking to bad websites are made nofollow so that they will not affect our search rankings. See example below for nofollow link:
<a href=” http://technokarak.com”rel=”nofollow”> Technology Blog </a>
DoFollow Links are followed by all the search engines including Google Bot and they are mostly used when we interlinks our articles within the same blog. See example below for dofollow link:
<a href=” http://technokarak.com”rel=”dofollow”> Technology Blog </a>
What Google Says about nofollow links?
According to the official word from Google
In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
It is very much clear from the above that making external and bad links nofollow helps in increasing SEO score.
Why you should make external links from your blog as nofollow
Simple and straight answer to the question is to maintain and improve the search engine ranking. You don’t want to let search engine follows each and every link going out from your blog. As far as SEO is concerned, it is not good to have too many dofollow links in your blog post. Some of the areas of your blog that should ne make nofollow are as follows:
- Affiliate Links
- Image Credit Link
- Blog Roll links
- Any External Link
How to add nofollow to all External Links in WordPress Blog
You can make any link as nofollow manually by adding rel=”nofollow” attribute to the default link but it is not suitable if you are linking too many websites outside your blog. To automate the process in wordpress there is plugin available that automatically makes all the external links as nofollow. One such plugin is WP External Links which is explained in detail in the following section.
WP External Links
Here is a simple and step by step tutorial on how to install and configure WP External Links plugin on your WordPress blog. Please follow the screenshots attached carefully for better understanding.
1. Download and Install WP External Links Plugin from here
2. Go to the Options page of the installed plugin
3. Set the SEO settings as described in the figure below
4. You can set the style settings also by adding an icon to the external links. See figure below
Hope you like the article..
