From now onwards we are starting Blog tips for bloggers who are new to blogging and SEO (Search Engine optimization). Though these tips will mainly be meant for Wordpress users but you can also implement them if you have Blogspot or any other Blogging platform.
If you don’t know, Wordpress by default makes all your tags dofollow. Some bloggers for this reason avoid displaying of tags after their posts or displaying those tag clouds.
Why does nofollow tag links a good SEO technique ?
I am sure, there must be lot of tags that you create after every post. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc have to keep index of all the pages associated with these tags which in long run can not only affect your Page Rank but may show even better SERP than your post which you should avoid (Think why ?)
Basically this will improve your ratio of (inbound links):(indexed pages) also.
If you see the source, your tags after the posts as well as on the tag cloud generated by Wordpress will be like
<a rel="tag" href="link_to_tag_page">Tag_Name</a>
clearly specifying it to be dofollow links.
How to make tags nofollow in Wordpress ?
Since I think there’s a bug with WP as you cannot add filter to the_tags, I was not able to make working plugin for it. However, there’s an easy way out for this.
# Open wp-includes/category-template.php and search for rel="tag"
# Replace rel="tag" to rel="tag nofollow" and save the file on your server.
Please note that there will be 2 instances where you’ll find this. One written in function wp_generate_tag_cloud which is for TAG cloud and other written in get_the_term_list which displays the tags generated by the_tags() function.
This will work perfectly for Wordpress version 2.6 and 2.7 too. Though for very old versions you won’t find rel="tag" line. There you can just add the nofollow rel link.
Last step: Add the following lines to your robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tag/
This will prevent Google and other search engines to index your tags page and help them to better understand what things to keep in their index and what to not.
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NOTE: We’ll be writing regularly on Blogging Tips from now onwards. You are welcome to suggest us something if you want. You can also contact us if you want to participate in this series and want to write for us.
This will prevent Google and other search engines to index your tags page
False. nofollow doesn’t control indexing (and is not supposed to btw). It is used for managing page rank stuff.
There are two ways to prevent pages from indexing - robots.txt and meta noindex.
oops! seems like I missed the blockquote for robots.txt
But still, Rarst, I am sorry but I beg to differ a bit here. Actually we were also in same dilemma earlier. If you read Wikipedia article about nofollow links, there’s kind of confusion which says that Google DOES follows nofollow links but doesn’t index them.
Moreover, if that is so, Commenting on high authority blogs will be much easier method to quickly index your new pages (leave apart sitemaps and other seo techniques)
Commenting on different search engine algorithms will be bit difficult but this is what our SEO expert has recommended for us and definitely it has proved to show us better SERPs
I really appreciate that you’ve raised this question as I was also expecting this. Thanks for visiting!