Some of us uses the internal blogroll function in WordPress, but just because you can’t add the nofollow attribute some people are putting up their blogroll by hand!
Why add nofollow?
As suggested by Google, it’s best to use rel=”nofollow” to avoid any potential backlash from the external links in the blogroll. However, I should also mention that there is some very strong criticism against it as well. This is up to you if you want to use it or not. If you decide to, here is how to make WordPress automatically add nofollow to all of your blogroll links.
How to make WordPress automatically add nofollow to the blogroll
You should be somewhat experienced with the WordPress core source codes to do this! Do this at your own risk!
- Find the wp-includes directory in your WordPress folder.
- Edit the file called bookmark-template.php in a text editor.
- Find the following code (line 86 in WP 2.5.1):
$output .= '<a href="' . $the_link . '"' . $rel . $title . $target. '>'; - Replace it with the following line:
$output .= '<a href="' . $the_link . '"' . $title . $target. ' rel="nofollow">'; - As you can see we added the rel=”nofollow” at the end. Now save and upload the file again. Now the attribute will be added to every link in your blogroll.
Why would you want to? Surely the very point of the blogroll is to link to those sites you personally enjoy and therefore vouch for?
@Jem: If you have more outgoing links than incoming, it might be a good idea. However, if you don’t care about rankings at all, don’t have that many in your blogroll or if you don’t have advertisers in it (some do), you shouldn’t use it either. So I guess it depends on what your goal is.
Very interesting post. I would do it but every time I edit core files my install breaks. But I thought dofollow plugins only effected comment links?
@Jenny: The dofollow only affects comment links yes. But from what I know the blogroll has always been dofollow.