***Note*** Jack from the erratic and eclectic Room 237 Writing Room correctly points out that I too am using a plugin to add the nofollow tag.  In order for you to see the screenshots below, you need to install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.  This tiny plugin is so wonderful, I will dedicate the next article to it.  It does tables, image insertion, and so much more it requires a whole post to do it justice.  If you do not want to install the plugin, simple scroll down to the very bottom of the article, look at the text examples, and edit your code by hand to add the rel=”nofollow” to the link. 

After my last post Lack Of Netiquette: SEO Greed Or Stupidity?, I realized many WordPress users needed a simple tutorial on how to create links and then add the Nofollow relationship.  Turns out some people relied upon plugins to make the change, which ended up making every link on their blog nofollow.  Other’s would simply copy and paste a link they found into their write screen to create a link.  That left them to the mercy of the original html.  Luckily, the process is surprisingly simple once learned.

Step one:  Type the text portion into your post.  Remember, if you want to reward the person, use meaningful keywords in the sentence.  Below are two examples, one bad, one good, with the portion I intend to make a hyperlink underlined.

  • Example 1 - “Fragileheart.com is one of my top droppers for the month.”  Linking to fragileheart.com as both the anchor text and the destination only helps that blog rank for the term “fragileheart.com”.  Now look at the example below.
  • Example 2 – “Fragileheart’s journal contains personal ramblings from the heart“  As much as I would liked to have used her own keywords, Fragileheart hasn’t updated them in some time. “gadgets, handphone, pda, computers, music, laptop, review, news” really have nothing to do with her current blog.  Maybe I’m totally wrong and she wants to rank for that tech stuff, but I’m using my best guess here and providing anchor text that contain keywords I think she’d like.


Step two:  Hold down the left mouse button and highlight the entire text you want to make into a link.  Then click the insert/edit link  button that looks like a chain link.  

wordpress link tutorial 1

Step three: A pop-up box will appear after you click on the link button.  Insert the URL you want the link to point to.  Remember, linking to specific pages are better then linking to the main blog URL, especially when the anchor keywords used are more relevant to that page.  If you want your link to be dofollow, that’s it!  Click insert and you’re are finished.  See the image below for my link URL.

Wordpress links tutorial 2

Step four: (optionally set the link as nofollow)  To set the link as nofollow,  go to the advanced tab in the insert/edit link dialogue box we used above.  If you already closed the popup, just left mouse click on the link and the insert/edit link button will turn gray.  Click the grayed button and you can now edit the existing link.  The fourth tab over is the advanced tab.  Look for the dropdown menu that says “Relationship page to target”.  Select “No Follow”, click “Update”, and you are finished.

Wordpress links tutorial 3

Why make any link No Follow?  That’s an excellent question.  Officially No Follow indicates you don’t trust the link.  Translated to the real world, by making spammy links No Follow you will improve your google pagerank and appear higher in the search engine results.  You may have noticed WordPress makes all comment links Nofollow, which can be changed by using a plugin.  As a rule, I make all affiliate links No Follow.  In addition, I go through my old posts and make some of those links No Follow as well.  The reason may surprise you.

Bloggers quit blogging all the time.  They simply let their domain expire.  Now a smart domainer will check this expiring domain, and see that it has backlinks pointing to it.  They will buy this domain and then put some porn or gambling site on it.  With almost 250 posts, that’s a lot of backlinks I have to watch over.  So to make matters simple, 6-8 months later I go back to my old posts and nofollow any link I am not sure of.

SEO Scoundrels have ulterior motives:  They believe that one way links increase their page rank even faster.  So they like to blog about other people and then give them a nofollow link in the article in hopes of getting a do follow link in return.  When they get called out on it they’ll be sure to mumble something about “branding” or “any link is a good link”. 

How to see if a link is nofollow: There is an easy way in Firefox , a hard way in Internet Explorer, and a firefox plugin that will do it for you automatically. 

  • The Firefox plugin is called Search Status.  It will show all nofollow links in pink.  Javascript can fool this plugin, so always verify using one of the two methods below.
  • The easy way in Firefox is to right click any link and choose “Properties” from the menu.  If a relationship has been set it will tell you.  “Relation: No Follow” means the link is no follow obviously.
  • In Internet Explorer the way I do it is to click “View” and then “Source”.  Search for your link and look for something that says “Rel=nofollow”.  Let’s look at two examples below, one dofollow and one nofollow.

Fragileheart’s journal contains personal ramblings from the heart. 

<a href="http://www.fragileheart.com/journal/">Fragileheart's journal contains personal ramblings from the heart.</a>


Fragileheart’s journal contains personal ramblings from the heart.

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.fragileheart.com/journal/">Fragileheart's journal contains personal ramblings from the heart.</a>

As you can see, the second example has rel=”nofollow” in the link code.  Like most things in life, simple enough once you get used to the process.

Post to Twitter Post to Plurk Plurk This Post Post to Yahoo Buzz Buzz This Post Post to Delicious Delicious Post to Digg Digg This Post Post to Ping.fm Ping This Post Post to Reddit Reddit This Post Post to StumbleUpon Stumble This Post