ShamusJameson

And to reiterate, when I installed this plugin it worked great and there were no outbound links. They secretly added 3 outbound links to every instance of using their plugin at a later time with no warning whatsoever to the unsuspecting users. These links were malicious in that they drained PR from PR from the page the plugin was used on and one of teh links looks like it might be a paid link so it risked getting the unsuspecting user banned from the Google main index. Applian stated “I know there was no explicit permission for our plugin to add these links, but what plugin does?” well no decent plugin does that. It’s poor judgement and malicious code.

Originally when Google implemented nofollow they mistakenly did not subtract PR from the page and that lead to the “PR sculpting” phenomenon. They fixed that and all outbound links reduce PR from the page just no follow do not pass it to the untrusted target. I copied the links you added to my site maliciously and posted them in my first review post. You can see they were all do follow links. One of them looks like it’s to an affiliate site “sharesale.com??” and how dare you risk getting my site banned by Google for paid links? That looks like it could be a paid link. For anyone following this I reported this plugin as a malicious plugin to [email protected] asking that it be removed form the WordPress Repository. You may do the same if you were shocked to find this plugin added outbound links to your pages with no advanced warning.

I was angry and reactionary when I wrote that so I do apologize. I had 2 videos displayed (using your plugin) on the homepage of a PR 4 site with no outbound links. You – without asking my permission first – added 6 outbound links that were not there for months… which removed most of that PR 4 from my homepage. 4 of the links may have been nofollow, but 2 links you took the PR with do follow links. All links subtract PR from the page even though nofollow links don’t pass it to the untrusted target. From Wikipedia: “any link with a nofollow attribute decreases the PageRank that the page can pass on”. When you replied that Google won’t punish sites for using nofollow links… that is totally wrong. You reduced the PR of the page that normally would have flowed back into other internal pages. Some people might not care but I think you should inform people who were previously using the plugin without links that one of your updates added those outbound links. Regards –