Quick tip: Watch out for WordPress
Sunday, January 27th, 2008 
SEO, Tips and Tricks
One of the most common items in a list of things to do when SEOing your site is to create good backlinks from related sites, and in particular, blogs. Thousands of SEO guides recommend leaving relevant comments on a related blog post to your site with a link and good anchor text.
But before you rush out onto the world wide web writing hundreds of comments on blogs that talk about the widgets you sell, don’t forget that the vast majority of blogs, like this one, are built with WordPress. Whilst this is no bad thing - I recommend WordPress to the hills and back - it’s worth noting that they have automatically included ‘nofollow’ on comment links and that you have to download a special plugin to remove it.
This means when you make a comment on a blog about widgets with a nice anchor link back to your site, you’ve not actually accomplished much because Google won’t follow the link and won’t give you any link juice from that site. You may get a few extra visitors but no backlink and no juice. As it says in the Google blog:
From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.
This can really suck because this isn’t really mentioned in the download nor is it visible in the code templates, so many blogers simply won’t know about it or be bothered to remove it. I personally have removed nofollow from this blog with this plugin but when you go out there on your link building campaigns, don’t forget to check the source code of the page. If a previously posted comment looks like this:
<a href=‘http://www.thediscountblog.co.uk’ rel=‘external nofollow’>
phil</a> posted this on January…
you won’t get a backlink and you certainly won’t get any juice.
Bookmark this article!
