The Basics

First of all, for those of you unfamiliar with html, here is what a normal link looks like:

   <a href="http://www.asite.com/">Good Site</a>

On a web page all you would see is "Good Site" and when you click on it you would be taken to http://www.asite.com/.

When you create a web page, very often you will have links to resources or examples of what you are writing about. But these links have a two-fold purpose:

• Obviously, the reader can visit by clicking the link.
• Because you are linking to an external document, you are in effect saying that you approve of the materials there, and so you are passing some of your authority or Page Rank juice to that page.

As the author of a page you are not going to link to a spammy or crap page and so in general it might be okay to pass on the juice. As long as your page is relevant, Google will treat your link as a valid back-link to the other site’s page.

How to keep the juice

This is easily done by adding a property to the link:

   <a href="http://www.asite.com/" rel="nofollow">Iffy Site</a>

This should also be used on some of your internal links. You do not want every single page to have Page Rank. For example, the contact page - why juice it up? Really, only the homepage and the content pages should have page rank, because these are the pages that you want people to visit.

When it comes to your blog, in this case WordPress, a decision was made to have all comments and links within them, pings and trackbacks to have "nofollow" links in them so that it would discourage the spammers.

Unfortunately, it didn’t. These days we have Akismet, Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2, so we can pretty well keep the spam at bay. The only ones that the "nofollow" hurts are the actual commentators. True, readers can click on the link and the commentator will get a visitor. But the commentator, as far as Google and Yahoo are concerned, will not get the benefit of a back-link.

To overcome this, you could edit one of the core files (no, I’m not gonna tell you which one!) but then you would have to do it every time you upgrade. Instead, several authors have created plug-ins to do the job for you.

nofollow_case_by_case: I’m currently using this one. This one will automatically remove the nofollow from comment links, pingbacks and trackbacks. However you can apply the nofollow to any comment or author link that you choose not to support. For example a iffy link inside a good comment.

dofollow: This simply removes the nofollow from the comments.

Lucia’sLinkLove: This is another popular one.

Nofollow Free: This removes the nofollow from the author links and/or from the comments text links and it optionally inserts an image band at the top of the page with the phrase: "NOFOLLOW FREE".

There are quite a few more, and for other platforms, have a look at Andy Beard’s Ultimate list. He also manages the DoFollow Community, a growing group of nofollow followers.

If you are interested in using the nofollow to direct pagerank to the right pages then have a read of Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches, also by Andy Beard, and then get the Nofollowdupes plugin.

Also, if you get the Search Status plugin for FireFox, you can see any link that has the “nofollow” attribute.

One final note. If you do remove the nofollow from comments, you should check all links in comments because, if they are "unsavoury" they will have a negative impact on your page’s ranking.