Nofollow

Comments by default are no-follow. Footer and blogroll links are doflollow by default.

So this leaves the post and page links – if you add them manually you can put in a rel=”nofollow” tag with each link you create.

Thanks but I am not clear on this – when I use firebug to audit the page it shows blogroll, footer and everything else as nofollow on the page? Help!

In your wordpress settings, go to the privacy pane/window and change your settings to allow search engines.

Also, you mentioned plugins – I’d check to see how many of them are still activated (if any) and if they could be interfering.

I checked that and even deactivated the plugin i had and also reverted to original theme but still get nofollow throughout site. It seems like the plugin for nofollow is siteweide. trying to find someway to sculpt page rank. do you know if there is a way in the code to overrite the nofollow tag selectively? ex. can i go into code and make some links dofollow even though the page has been declared nofollow?

thanks

If a SITE and PAGE is no-follow then no search engines will see/index the site. This is different from putting nofollow in links (the “a” tag). One is done via the robots.txt and the other is in the html coding. I am not clear on what you mean.

Matt Cutts, who works for Google, says that pagerank sculpting is essentially a waste of time: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

I’m no expert but it is my understanding that if I don’t make blog visible then the entire site is nofollow. I see this as a global method to control nofollow. The other method would be to make the site visible and selectively make links nofollow. This method is too laborious. Essentially, I am trying to find out if it is possible to make everything on the site nofollow with the exception of certain areas carved out, such as a footer link or sidebar, for example.

On Matt Cutts, I have read a lot of his stuff and I don’t believe everything he says. Part of the reason for that is you could imagine what would happen if he said sculpting works – people would be optimizing just for page rank and that wouldn’t do end users any good. SEO Moz actually ran a test on this to see if they could pass page rank with an experiment and it found out that page rank sculpting actually does work – although it may still have no affect on rankings.

Thanks

The method is laborious, yes. However, with WordPress, when you make your blog invisible to search engines – no robot will ever index your site. The links in your site can have any tag on them, but it won’t matter because no site will ever see them.

Let me explain how privacy settings work in WordPress.

When you select “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers”, your robots.txt looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

The entire site is available to be crawled and indexed by search engines.

When you select “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”, your robots.txt looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

No search engine will crawl or index your site.

Thanks for the clarification. Is there any other way to make most links nofollow with the exception of certain areas? On a blog, which can be thousands of pages the by-hand method doesn’t seem practical.

Like I said, if you enable your site to be crawled by search engines, all comments by default will be nofollow. That’s how wordpress works. IT’s because lots of spammers try to put links in comments.

I always make footers nofollow because I’m envious of all the theme developers who have tons of links. I’m probably wrong to do this because they deserve some credit in the form of better rankings and higher PR but oh well. Their link is still there.

Do you want to make your footers and blogrolls nofollow? What links are you looking to make dofollow?

A link to your site would be helpful as well.

In addition, if you are mentioning a website in a post, a simple way to make a link not followable would be to not make it a hyperlink.

If you are looking to have google not follow your own pages, I ask why? Google loves big sites – the bigger your site is, and the more links you have pointing to you, the more authority and strength your site has.

Ultimately what I would like to do is have all external links nofollow

Ah, I see what you want to do. Sorry for not understanding you correctly. Your first step is to make the site to allow search engines, via your privacy settings.

This one could work: https://blogulate.com/content/nofollow-blacklist-plugin-for-wordpress/

But it’s from 2008. Be careful with old plugins as there is the chance of a security vulnerability. Just sayin’.

Also, google considers link buying/pr juicing schemes to be outside their guidelines. If caught you could get de-indexed and banned from the Goog and you could also get any adsense money revoked.

I know you disagree with Matt Cutts but the posts are helpful. Of course what you do with your website is your choice.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/

I didn’t realize google considers this outside the guidelines. Thanks for the advice. I agree on the Matt Cutts thing also. I think he tries to be helpful without giving too much because his answers have huge influence on what people do with their sites.

thanks again for all of you help – very informative