What Happened to All My Nofollow Tags in WordPress?
A "nofollow" tag is an HTML element that is optionally added to an HREF anchor link to another page. Nofollow tags tell a search engine that links containing these tags should not be considered when creating relevance maps of sites being indexed. WordPress does not automatically create nofollow tags, so if nofollow tags suddenly disappear it is likely due to an issue with the site's template or plugins.
Other People Are Reading
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Nofollow Tags
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Google invented the nofollow tag as a way of allowing blog maintainers a method of controlling spammers on their sites. Spam comments on a popular website frequently contain links to external websites, and these links can provide those sites with some of the Google search relevance of the blog where they are posted. By including the nofollow tag in all links posted as comments to a blog, Google and other compliant search engines ignore these links when ranking websites, so most of the value of posting spam comments is removed, and spamming activity should then fall off.
Use in WordPress
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The value of a nofollow link to a WordPress administrator primarily comes when a blog generates many comments, some of which legitimately contain links to third-party sites. In these cases, it may not be possible for the site administrator to catch all of the spam comments, some of which may slip through among legitimate traffic. WordPress plugins can automatically rewrite any posted links with a nofollow tag, which does not impede normal conversation but is devastating to the purposes of spam commenters. Nofollow tags may also be used in the overall template alongside robots.txt files, if the WordPress site administrator wishes to keep portions of his own site from being indexed by search engines.
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Sources of Problems
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The most common reason for a WordPress blog that previously posted nofollow tags to suddenly stop comes from a conflict between a plugin and the overall site template, or the WordPress software itself. This happens most frequently after an upgrade to the WordPress software or template, causing a plugin to no longer function. The issue can also occur outside of WordPress if Web server functionality is used instead of WordPress to add the nofollow tag.
Resolving Nofollow Removal
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Check the plugins page on your WordPress dashboard to see if any of the plugins have been automatically disabled, as this indicates that these are in conflict with the version of WordPress you are using. Plugins that have an available update will indicate this with an Update button, which you can use to see if this resolves the problem. If not, identify which of your plugins provides the nofollow tag service, and deactivate other plugins temporarily to see if the function returns; if this resolves the problem, turn the other plugins back on one by one to see which one causes the conflict. Nofollow tags may also be added in the Web server setup, such as the mod_rewrite module in Apache. If you have administrative access to the Web server setup files, check to see whether the URLs you are sending match the rewrite strings in the Web server; otherwise, ask the administrator of the Web server you use to assist you.
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