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And how to do it in WordPress

Why the need to nofollow links? Well it has been said affiliate links can jeapordise your website’s organic ranking, and it has even be said search engines can see them as paid links of all things. Here are some of Google’s now rather vague link guidelines. Not sure what I mean by nofollow? Check out this Wikipedia page, then come back

When to follow links

If visitors to your site make a comment on your post(s), why not reward them with a following link – they are after all adding content and interactivity with your post, which are positives right? If they write shit, just spam them. Those that have their own site/blog deserve a link back from your post comments right? Surely this is in the spirit of the web and linking the right way.

This is the plugin that switches follow on in your post comments (which by default will be nofollow boooo).

When to nofollow links

Well if you’ve got affiliate links, stick the nofollow attribute on them. Another reason to use nofollow is for paid-for links. If you’re nervous about Google ranking penalties, then you better add nofollow on these links. This can be done very easily if these links are in your blogroll or links list with this simple plugin.

If the links are in your post, you can manually add via ‘html view’ in the post editor rel=”nofollow” individually. Just make sure you never make the mistake of adding nofollow to the whole website, that would be very bad for you and rather silly!

How to see follow and nofollow on the web

If you don’t want to get into the page source, just add this search plugin for Firefox.

Once installed, right click on the @ symbol in your status bar and click ‘Highlight nofollow’ (example result below) and pow! your affiliate and paid links should no longer be following, so you’re all safe from Google slapping the life out of your natural ranking.