How to Nofollow Settings on All WordPress External Links
How to Nofollow Settings on All WordPress External Links: Do you want to post external nofollow links on your WordPress website? While you can easily add nofollow tags to individual links too, what if you want to nofollow all external links? Now in this article, I will show you how to set nofollow for all external links in WordPress.
Why and When You Need to Nofollow All External Links
Search engines consider links or links to be ranking signals for URLs and linked domains. When you link to an external website, that’s where you pass your link juice to that website.
Link juice is your type of SEO scorecard. If you link to more sites than sites that link back to yours, then you will start to lose authority.
This is why many SEO experts recommend using the nofollow attribute.
Example of a link with the nofollow attribute:
By default, WordPress doesn’t allow you to add nofollow to external links automatically. So here you have to add this manually to outbound links to external sites.
ALSO READ: 5 Easy Steps To Get Google’s First Rank Without Backlinks
An easier way is to use the Title and NoFollow For Links plugins. It adds a title field and a nofollow checkbox in the Insert link popup. You can create a nofollow link when you add it.
But if you run a copywriting website, then it increases the chances of your writer forgetting to tick the box for some external links. In this case, you need a solution that doesn’t require any user input.
Having said that, let’s see how you can add nofollow to all external links in WordPress without requiring any user input.
Adding NoFollow to All External Links in WordPress
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the External Links plugin. Upon activation, you need to visit Settings »External Links page to configure plugin settings.
The first option in plugin settings applies nofollow globally. You can still uncheck it if only you have access to your theme files.
Scroll down a bit and enable ‘Add No Follow’ by clicking on the checkbox next to it. This option will add nofollow to all external links in WordPress posts and pages.
There are a number of options on the settings page that you can activate.
You can also add nofollow to links in the WordPress text widget. You can also allow the plugin to treat subdomains as local sites and exclude them from the nofollow rules.
The External Link Plugin also allows you to open external links in a new window and you can even display an icon next to the external link.
If you have several other websites that you would like to exclude from the nofollow rules, you can add them under the ‘Domains to exclude’ section.
Don’t add HTTP or www and use commas to separate domains. Click the save changes button to save the settings.
Important: Please note that plugins add this attribute quickly. Deactivating the plugin will remove nofollow from all links.