When you blog with WordPress, you tend to add links to your posts. Links can be internal links, the ones that link to other pages or posts of your blog or they can be external links, those links which are linked to pages of another website. For some links, you might want to add the rel=’nofollow’ tags while for others, you want to leave it as it is. The preference depends upon you and your ways of linking.
But, what if you change your mind and you want to nofollow a number of links on all your posts. One day you might decide that your blog has too many outgoing links included with posts. In such cases, you will want to reduce outgoing links or you might want to add nofollow tags to those links. There might be other reasons why you want to change the dofollow or nofollow status of your outgoing links. We are not here to talk about the reasons but we are here to talk about how we can change the links following status.
One way, of doing it is by opening individual posts one by one, searching for links and then viewing the code of the post and adding the nofollow tags to those posts. This way is good enough if you need to edit only a few posts and you remember perfectly which posts they are. Another way of doing it is by using plugins. There are some plugins which can be used to bulk specify the status of outgoing links. With these, you can easily change all outgoing links in all your posts to nofollow. This bulk change is good enough, but then again, you might not want to nofollow all links.
The final method, is by using a plugin that allows you to review each and every link on all your posts. Then you can nofollow or remove nofollow from those links in those posts just with the help of this plugin. This is, by far, the best method that I have seen. The plugin that we use for this advanced task is: Outbound Link Manager. WordPress plugins website lists two authors: Sparro and Ruben Sargsyan as the developers of this plugin.
To bulk manage nofollow / dofollow status of your links in all your posts, one by one or at once using Outbound Link Manage plugin, follow these steps with instructions:
- Install and activate the plugin. The best method to install the plugin is from the Plugins > Add New of the WordPress admin menu of your own blog.
- The plugin will appear on the left side menu of your WordPress admin area. It will be listed as “Links Manager” in its own heading. Click on it to access it.
- All the outgoing links will be displayed as a summary in the plugin’s page. The post or page where the link is present is also displayed along with other information such as author, category and published date of the post.
- You can also filter the posts for which the outgoing links are displayed. You have options to:
- List posts only or pages only.
- List posts and links only with outbound links, inbound links or those links which are outbound as well as inbound links.
- List posts by month. For example: displaying posts made only on November 2013.
- List posts from a certain category of your WordPress blog.
- In the list, find the posts and then click the “Add NoFollow” or “Remove NoFollow” link in the Actions column. Your action will be applied to the post and you won’t have to edit the post manually. This part is carried out by the plugin itself.
- You can also edit the html of the link exclusively. This gives you the opportunity to change link titles, target window, dofollow status or even the linked page.
- You also have the option to remove the link entirely.
- Bulk actions are also possible. If you want to change the nofollow / dofollow status of the links of multiple posts, just select those posts with the help of check boxes besides those posts. You can also bulk select all the posts in a single page.
- From the “Options” part of this great plugin, you will also be able to blacklist or whitelist domains. Domains in the blacklist can be configured to be always nofollowed. Those can be removed all at once as well. Whitelisted domains are the ones that are never touched.
In this way, you will easily edit the outgoing as well as internal links of your website. You can assign the rel=nofollow attribute or remove it according to your wish. Customization option is really high.