WordPress SEO: Advanced Nofollow

WordPress is already well optimized when it comes to SEO (that's Search Engine Optimization). There are some basic changes that are usually performed by webmasters, like changing the link structure to include the title of the article, or displaying the title of the article in the web browser's title. Most WordPress admins stop there, some go ahead and install SEO plugins which do some magic in the background.

Advanced tips are not that easy to come by, and most websites running a WordPress blog do not have them implemented. This article lists some options that center around the nofollow tag.

Nofollow

Nofollow basically tells search engines like Google to not count the link vote that is usually being passed when linking on the Internet.

Most search engines see this as a vote for the linked resource. While you may not mind giving votes to respected web properties or other sites you like, you may sometimes link to sites that you don't want to vote for.

Another reason why this is beneficial is because of linking power. Each link that points to internal and external resources gets a piece of that linking power.

Not all linked pages should be treated equally however which is what this article is about. It makes for example no sense to pass linking power to internal pages that have no value, think of privacy policies, contact pages, login, log off or social bookmarking links.

WordPress themes come with a surprising number of links, the majority of which is not set to nofollow. Here are a few areas where you should consider placing the nofollow link tag in a WordPress blog:

• The more (read more) tag. The page is already linked from the title of the post properly.
• WordPress meta data
• Pages like Privacy Policies, Contact Us
• Social Bookmarking links

To add the nofollow link one would simply add the rel="nofollow"
tag to the link structure which is not a problem if the link is displayed in the source code of the theme, for example:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example Link</a>

There are however links (like the previously mentioned more tag) that cannot be manipulated in the theme source as the link is created by a php function.

Here is how you make the more tag in WordPress nofollow:

• Open the file post-template.php in the wp-includes folder.
• Locate the following line beginning with:$output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink()..
• Replace it with:$output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">$more_link_text</a>";
• You basically add the rel=\"nofollow\" tag to the line

This ensures that all more tags will be nofollow from then on.

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