Take control of your links
Every website/blog will eventually need links for a basic kind of optimisation for the search engines. Harmful links, if left unchecked may play havoc with your rankings. This article will focus more on the methodology of controlling links rather than the why of it. It will put across a few easy ways to get your links properly marked as per your choice, either follow or no follow.
Please note that this article is starting with the very basics, especially targeted for a beginner.
For users of blogger or blogspot, click on link and choose between options, Open link in a new window and Add a no follow attribute. Similar options are also available for an image, but you might never use it.
When you choose the HTML view as shown above, you can see the code. It is something like this
<a href=”http://snapmylink.com/” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://snapmylink.com</a>
target=”_blank” enables the link to open in a new windows and rel=”nofollow” tells the search engines not to follow the link. You must have realised by now that Blogger by default marks all links as dofollow, till you don’t mark them otherwise.
WordPress also offers similar options with slight changes. To add a link click on the icon in the editor and fill in the details in the pop up window. WordPress by default does not give any control over the follow attribute.
Moving to the text editor, one can see the code does not have the “rel=nofollow” attribute. Here the missing line can be added, again based on your requirement. Since WordPress uses the same interface for both wordpress.com and wordpress.org, the above instructions applies for both.
WordPress derives its power from plugins. There are two plugins which I want to highlight here.
NoFollowr
This plugin allows the administrator to see all links in a page or a post. Each link is either marked by a green tick or red circle, depending on the follow behaviour. To change the behaviour, a single click on the icon toggles the behaviour. A very useful tool in the hands of the admin to do some house keeping.
Ultimate Nofollow
This plugin adds the missing option right where it is supposed to be in the first place. A boon for those who are not comfortable with the html codes. Very sad that eventually WordPress will add this feature and this great plugin will go into obscurity. But then I hope the developer, Luke Mlsna will have had made something even better.
Images however do get an option to change this attribute.
All major Blogging platforms have this feature in one way or the other. If not available, you can always fall back to the HTML editor.