Last Updated on September 20, 2020 by Christopher G Mendla
UIPDATE – NOVEMBER 2019 – The Yoast SEO plugin is strongly suggesting that links are NOT nofollowed. The theory is that VALID outgoing followed links are good for SEO.
An important aspect of SEO is to carefully manage your ‘link juice’. That is the amount of ‘goodness’ or page rank that flows between sites based on links.
The general consensus is that you want to be extremely careful with linking to other sites. Otherwise the ‘goodness’ of your site will leak to the other sites. You definitely WANT to add the nofollow attribute to any paid links or if you have any suspicion about the reputation of the site you are linking to.
A tool to prevent this issue is Rel=nofollow.
There are a number of plugins for WordPress. I’m going to try Ultimate Nofollow for now and see how that works.
Here is a simple infographic from SeachEngineLand that helps explain the issue.
Summary – Rel=”Nofollow” can be extremely important in certain cases. It’s worth adding a plugin to handle adding the attribute until it becomes part of the core of WordPress. (This also applies to any website or content management system)
Posts and pages that should be set to no follow
Certain pages and posts should have the nofollow tag. This is mostly common sense. If a page on your site is not part of providing useful content for visitors, it should be nofollowed. For example:
- Author pages where there is only one author on the site.
- Search Results – Search results pages are collecting content that should have been indexed already.
- Thank you Pages – For the most part, a thank you page provides little or no value to the users.
External links
The rule of thumb is that if a link provides value to the user, then it should be followed. However, be careful with paid links. In almost all cases, they should have a NOFOLLOW tag.