No Follow Attribute
Using the No Follow Attribute is essential when trying to direct spiders or juice flow in your webpages. It’s very important to use the HTML code rel=”nofollow” on the majority of your outbound links, and even internal links. If this attribute is not used properly, then your pages will leak its authority juice to unwanted pages.
Blogs are built with a great SEO structure, but they lack the nofollow attribute on the majority of its internal links. One major example of this is when placing tags on a blog post. If you click on the tags, you will notice that it will take you to a different page.
You probably worked hard writing the blog post, and probably had a lot of backlinks pointing to it. You probably searched it on Google to see if it has been indexed, but you notice that your tag page appears. The problem is that you’re flowing that backlink juice to your tag pages, instead of keeping it on the actual post page.
Most of us are notorious for using at least 4-5 tags on a blog post. That means your blog post is leaking to at least 5 different pages! If you continue to use the same tag in every blog post then that tag page will become the dominant page of all those posts.
Tags were not created to be searchable on a search engine. Tags were created to be searched WITHIN the blog using the blog’s search function. Archives & Categories were also created for users to be able to find information on your webpage. Archives, Categories, and Tag pages were not made to be indexed in the search engines. They will only create duplicate content. There will be 4 pages of the same information. (Your blog post, tag page, archive, and category page)
All of your pages should point to your home page which is the most important page in your website. If you have 10 blog posts, and they’re all using the same tag, then that tag page will now become the authority of the 10 posts. Should you stop using tag pages? No.
Use this code to help you place a nofollow attribute on categories and tag pages.
On wordpress go to wp-includes\category-template.php, open it up in notepad, and find this line
$rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ‘rel=”category tag”‘ : ‘rel=”category”‘;
change rel=”category tag to “nofollow” so it appears like ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ : ‘rel=”category”‘;
Also find $rel = ( is_object($wp_rewrite) && $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() ) ? ‘ rel=”tag”
add nofollow to tag so it appears like this rel=”tag nofollow”‘
I have tried many different plugins, and they all failed to place the “no follow attribute” on the tags. Make sure to place it on the tag cloud.
Here are other links that is helping you LOSE juice from your pages or should have a nofollow attribute because of the anchor text being used.
Home button – the word ‘Home’ is an actual anchor text that points to your home page. Your webpage is not about ‘Home’ so I would recommend putting a nofollow on it.
Contact us/About Us/Privacy Information/TOS/Maps – these links on your page should have a nofollow attribute. These pages should not carry any weight, and do not contain actual content that may pertain to the website’s message. Website visitors come to read your content not the privacy information or TOS.
Read More/Learn More – This is another example of ‘anchor text’ being used. Usually the title of the post is being showed with anchor text/hyperlink, and a 2nd link will be redundant. It also doesn’t make sense to give juice to a page with the anchor text “Read More” or “Learn More”.
Comments – It’s important to turn off the feature under Settings/Discussion and unclicking “Break comments into pages with…” Otherwise Google will also index these comments as a separate page from the blog post. It’s important to put nofollow attributes on any links that are coming from the comments. Otherwise you will lose link juice! Make sure to put a nofollow on the Comments Feed.
Gravatar – another sneaky outbound link that needs a nofollow tag on it! No wonder this website has a SEO pagerank of 7!
Login/Logout/WP-Admin/Author pages – All of these links should have a nofollow attribute. You should also download the ‘Robots Meta’ plugin so that you can also put a ‘noindex’ on these pages.
Blogroll links – these links should have no follow attributes as well unless you actually want to pass juice to another website.
Social bookmarking buttons – make sure these buttons have nofollow attributes or you will have all that juice flowing away from your pages!
