Comment on WordPress SEO Plugins by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO Plugins LOL Mark,

I like the “cottage industry of adsense sites” comment :)

Very good nofollow questions.

Right now all the WordPress themes on this site have ALL administration type links nofollow. This includes:

Login links.
Registration links (if you use that feature).

Also these links are nofollow as well:

RSS Feed links (including the Follow-up RSS Comments Feed links)
Trackback (including the Leave a Trackback links)

This only leaves true content links like-

Blog Post pages
Pages
Categories
Archives (monthly, daily etc…)
Tags

Because of the formatting of a normal WordPress blog we need to keep either the Categories or Archives (normally Monthly) followed as otherwise Google etc… would only index the 10 posts linked from the home page and any blog posts linked from external sources!!

You could in theory also keep an entire WordPress blog indexed by keeping the Tag links followed, but only if you give every blog post at least one Tag and not everyone uses Tags.

So to be safe we need either Categories or Monthly Archives to follow for full indexing.

I personally use the Category links to pass link benefit through to every blog post on the site and recommend others do the same since the Category pages can add traffic to a site IF they also target SERPs not covered by individual blog posts.

If you have a site with a Funny Jokes Category, but none of the jokes actually include the phrases or partial title “Funny Jokes” the main Category page stands a chance to rank for that and related SERPs, especially as all the content will be related to that phrase. If you nofollow Categories you might be loosing traffic from potential SERPs.

In contrast the content of the Monthly Archive pages have no keyword focus. therefore their no benefit to having them indexed in any search engine as long as long as all the pages of your WordPress site can be found and spidered (the Category links).

If you look at my WordPress installations like this one you will see the Category links and Tag links are followed and I haven’t even included the Monthly Archive menu item.

Easiest way to achieve this is use widgets (or manually edit the sidebar.php file) and don’t add or remove the monthly archives menu item then there is no need to worry about nofollow.

If you want to use the Monthly Archive links with nofollow you could either edit the theme (not looked up how) or use a plugin (not used any like that).

David Law