2 Easy Ways To Add Nofollow Links in WordPress
So, you got this far making your site great. We showed you some of the basic and advanced stuff. We also presented you with solutions on how to fix certain errors. Today, we will change the topic a little, and talk about a technique that can help you with your page ranking. Have you heard anything about nofollow links in WordPress? No? That’s totally fine. That is why we are here to show you how to add nofollow links in WordPress! This tutorial works on any WordPress theme.
In this article, you can find out:
- What is a nofollow link?
- What are the basic examples of the nofollow links?
- How To Add Nofollow Link Manually or via Plugin?
What Is A Nofollow Link?
In short, a “Nofollow” is a part of the HTML tag (specifically, an attribute). It is used as a virtual note on our door (link) saying “search engines are not welcome here“. It tells Google not to go further than the line we create. When your site has an external link pointing to a potentially harmful site, you lose both the “link juice” and Google’s trust with it. Link juice is essentially a value divided among pages and sites linked from your site. It works as a measure that adds or detracts from your page ranking score. So avoiding problems like the one we just mentioned is a priority. There are 2 types of links – dofollow and nofollow.
Examples Of The Nofollow Links Use
To explain “nofollow tags” in more detail we will present some of the situations you would want to put this attribute on.
Links we are not fully confident about (untrusted links)
As described before having a link that refers to a site with suspicious data will directly hurt your site. Sites that look too good to be true are usually the ones you should stay away from (e.g. “get-a-small-loan-of-1000000-dollars-in-just-one-click.com”). To be safe, you should avoid linking these in the first place, but if you must, absolutely use the nofollow attribute!
Comments on your blog
Yes, a big part of your audience will comply with your rules, and love you unconditionally, but, there is always that other side of the internet. The Dark Side! Some of the people will intentionally link spam or untrusted links. In this instance, you should use nofollow links in WordPress in all of the comments. Nevertheless, you are in luck. WordPress already does that automatically, so you just need to worry about links you post (since they are by default a dofollow link). As a bonus tip, we think the best practice is to just turn off links in the comments completely. This way you are protecting both your site’s score and your users.
Sponsored Content And Affiliate Links
This is another thing you should remember. Google likes to connect related content and promote sites that are based on a particular thing. However, in some situations, sponsored posts/links don’t follow this logic. If you link a sports magazine to your wedding gowns store site, Google may think you are trying something fishy (though it would definitely be great for a sport that somehow incorporates wedding theme). We all know money makes the world go round, but you should absolutely use nofollow attribute here. It will make the site you are referring to not interfere with your page ranking.
Posts or Sites Outside Of Your Niche
If you are trying to make a brand and make your site associated with a distinct subject or theme, you should avoid experimenting. The problem is not that this is going to create concern among your viewers. You should make all of the links on your site revolve around a brand you chose because it will increase your score. For other subjects/posts use nofollow technique!
Links that appear on every page
This is one of the huge minuses. If for example, you link your homepage (or any page) in all your other pages (in the footer, a sidebar or somewhere similar) every time there is an update on your site a backlink will be generated, making your site fall lower in page rankings. To fix this, just use nofollow links in WordPress and there will be no problems.
*Note that this attribute doesn’t block any user activity, so no worries there! The only things getting blocked are google bots.
Will Nofollow Link Always Be Respected By Google?
Google’s algorithm uses these things called crawlers or crawler robots to gather as much information as it can about stuff on the internet. Sites that are found are then indexed. Sometimes, the page with nofollow link will be indexed in search engines. However, Google bots won’t really search through the content and that link won’t affect your score!
How To Add Nofollow Links In WordPress?
There are two ways you can do it. The manual way, and using WordPress plugins. Each way is as easy and efficient as the other, so choose whichever you like. You can also do this with robots.txt. If you want to know more about this specifically, you can check our robots.txt guide.
Manually
To make a nofollow link with WordPress all you have to do is:
- Make a link by pressing on the “Insert/edit link” button.
- Change the mode from Visual to Text.
- Add the “rel nofollow” attribute so it changes from this:
to this:
- And you are done!
Using The Plugin
We first need to install the plugin. To do this you need to:
- Go to Plugins.
- Click on “Add New“.
- Find nofollow plugins you need (we will be using the “Title and Nofollow For Links” plugin)
- Press “Install Now” and then “Activate“
Once you install and activate, select the text you want to make a link out of. Click on the “Insert/edit link” button and press this little gear button to configure the link.
Check the “Add rel=”nofollow” to link” option and press “Add Link”.
That’s it. It wasn’t so hard, wasn’t it!
Conclusion
In your pursuit of making the Greatest Site In The World, you must’ve come across at least some of the basic knowledge about Google’s algorithm and page ranking system. Thus, we have shown you one of the ways to play on their terms and now you know how to add nofollow links in WordPress. Use it wisely! For more step by step WordPress tutorials follow our WordPress blog.
