Every site owner is aware of what is a nofollow link. If you are searching for “How To Add Nofollow Tag To Links In WordPress” in Google, you were probably concentrating on on-page SEO. On-Page SEO plays an important role to get a better rank in search engines, especially in Google. A good SEO practice is giving dofollow links to trustworthy and authoritative sites, and nofollow for affiliates and other source links. Adding a nofollow attribute to an external link will stop passing the link juice to the website. To turn your links into nofollow simply follow the below guide.
What is a Nofollow tag?
A nofollow link is a link that doesn’t pass page rank to the linking pages. It was introduced back in 2005 by Google to allow webmasters to tell if the link is not endorsed by the webmaster, or if it is to a less-trusty website. Even though webmasters use the tag for various reasons, this was the primary goal of the nofollow tag.
Webmasters use the nofollow tag to prevent link juice flow from the website areas such as the comments. This is to prevent the possible spam caused by other web owners. They also use nofollow to link to paid promotional links, even though Google introduced a new rel=”sponsored” tag.
When should you use a Nofollow tag?
There are various reasons to use a nofollow tag. When should you use it will depend on your specific needs and requirements. However, as a general rule of thumb, you can use a nofollow tag in the following situations –
- Paid Links: If some person or company is compensating you for putting their links in your articles for promotional purposes, you should make the links nofollow or sponsored.
- Low-quality links: If you are linking to a low-quality website, you can use a nofollow tag. Low-quality website doesn’t mean all small websites.
- User-generated content: It is a good idea to put nofollow tag on almost all user-generated content. For example, in the comments, always use the nofollow tag for the links. This will greatly help to prevent link spam.
- Affiliate links: If you are participating in any affiliate programs by linking to products or services for a commission, you should use a nofollow tag on those links.
- Links to non-indexed pages: Even though not necessary, while linking to pages that are not indexed in the search engine series, it is a good idea to tell them that the link should be nofollowed.
How to add Nofollow tag to links
There are many ways to add a nofollow tag to a link in WordPress. You can use any one of them based on your requirements.
Method 1. Using the default WordPress links
Previously, it was not possible to easily add a nofollow tag without the help of an additional plugin. But after the introduction of the block editor, WordPress itself comes with an option to easily toggle nofollow. All you have to do is to –
- Add a link to a text.
- Click on that link once again.
- Turn on the “Search engines should ignore this link (mark as nofollow)” toggle.
Method 2. Adding Nofollow using the code editor
As we know WordPress is a very popular and user-friendly content management system. But unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t have any simple solution to add a nofollow attribute (on older versions) to a website that we don’t pass our juice. We have to manually add the nofollow tag to each link if you are willing to.
Adding a nofollow attribute to a WordPress is really a simple job. All you need to add the below code in the WordPress text editor mode. Now, here in the below code replace your website and Alt text in your website. It is a manual method to add nofollow tag to unwanted links.
<a href="http://example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example Website</a>Method 3. Adding Nofollow with Rel Nofollow Checkbox WordPress Plugin
Alternatively, we have Rel Nofollow Checkbox Plugin for WordPress to easily add a nofollow tag. To get started, simply add and activate the Plugin. The Plugin doesn’t have any additional settings to tweak the usage. It works directly on the Insert/Edit checkbox. To add a nofollow tag, simply click on the checkbox to add the tag.
How to set all External Links to Nofollow
The above two methods are suitable for those who want to add nofollow attribute to optional links. If you want to turn all external links into nofollow this simple Plugin will help you to change. External Links is a WordPress Plugin that turns all links into nofollow. After activation of the Plugin, it automatically adds the nofollow attribute to all existing external links.