In our recent video repost of SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday – Solving Indexation Problems – Rand talks about using the nofollow attribute to narrow the scope of links you present to SEC (Search Engine Crawlers).

Rand goes on to mention, using a forcing function such as nofollow causes Google bots to only pass link juice for one important navigation section such as Categories. Doing this will keep other pages such as your tags, search, date archive, and sitemap from stealing relevance and therefore rankings.

Excluding these pages also gives you the added bonus of cutting down on duplicate content, and keyword stuffing penalties you get from having elements such as tag clouds as Matt Cutts goes on to talk about in the video below.

equicktips.com goes on to mention a couple of helpful WordPress plugins that do this and much more. The main one that really stuck out to me was Nofollow Case by Case – which is now outdated but I would love to see someone pickup the torch.

After browsing WordPress.org for a few relevant plugins I happened upon this gem Nofollow Internal Links which takes care of all of our problems in one fell swoop.

Once activated,this plugin will add the “nofollow” rel attribute to unimportant internal link,including: read more, tag cloud links, categories, archive links,author post_link and comments popup link.

However looking at the above description – which was grabbed from the wordpress plugin page – you can see categories is set to nofollow. For my purposes I would like to use the category page and links for passing link juice, so I simply deleted the php call for nofollow on categories. If you are looking for a similar solution I have provided a download link below for my altered version of Jeriff Cheng’s Nofollow Internal Links plugin.

- Download via -

Right here: [download id="1"]
Wordpress.org: Pending

If this helped you out the best reward is a free backlink; sharing the post is awesome too!

Regards,
- Ben