Wordpress the_tags is Missing NoFollow
October 30th, 2007 by Michael Gray in BlogsIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Really wordpress when you decided to screw up the whole category system adding tags would it have been that hard to add a “nofollow” parameter flag to the_tags? I mean does anybody on the wordpress team get duplicate content as a concept?
You can get the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk which makes the pages noindex,nofollow but it would be nice to fix things front end as well … sigh
wordpress you really need to get a competent SEO on the development team. Out of the box you suck as far as search engine friendliness goes, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get things working.
Sphere It
October 31st, 2007 at 12:52 am
Haha. Sorry, I know this is supposed to be a serious post but I have to laugh because the XFN link relationship component is so lame. I love how the rel: textbox “pretends” to allow user input.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:58 am
Um, I don’t mean to be critical, but shouldn’t it be Google who changes their software to suit the folks at Wordpress rather than the other way ’round?
October 31st, 2007 at 4:25 am
Its very annoying with WordPress…
October 31st, 2007 at 8:23 am
Wholehearted agreement.
The issue that pisses me off the most is the “partial feeds if you use MORE tag” - that drives me nuts.
You have to either use a hack to get around it, annoy your readers with partial RSS, or put up with duplicate content on your homepage. All those choices suck.
October 31st, 2007 at 8:52 am
That was one of the first things I noticed too. I ended up just putting a
Disallow: /tag/
in my robots.txt file and that took care of it. My robots.txt file is loaded from the directories that WP uses that creates duplicate content anyway, so adding another disallow wasn’t that big of a deal.
By the way, I updated my robots.txt plugin as well and I couldn’t get it to work without crashing my edited posts, so I had to go back to the older version. Haven’t looked for a fix lately but it was a pain.
My disallow list goes something like this:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
for anyone that might want it
October 31st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Anyone know a simple way to nofollow the tag links?
October 31st, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Just put it in your robots.txt file? See above. Easy.
October 31st, 2007 at 7:56 pm
I think you need to hire a competent developer rather than bite the hand that feeds you (for free not to mention). Where’s the fucking pirate when you need him?
November 1st, 2007 at 3:27 am
Michael: i’ve just updated robots meta to allow for nofollowing tag links, and I added the option you were asking for to disable the index nofollowing
November 1st, 2007 at 3:33 pm
My only search-related annoyance with Wordpress is the default page title - it displays the blog name before the topic which always gets cut off in SERPs.
Otherwise I agree 100% with Jamdo. Google’s mission, not mine, is to organize the world’s information.
November 2nd, 2007 at 7:16 am
If Automatic suck so much at SEO how come they have 20 million plus visitors per month to one of their sites when you don’t? (wordpress.com). And don’t just say “it’s their backlinks”. That wasn’t any kind of accident.
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:21 am
um maybe it’s all those links they install by default in the bottom of every wordpress version
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Michael,
It’s the links at the bottom alright. The point is that those links weren’t put there by accident.
When wordpress first came out, what other cms/blog put links in all the templates back to the website and back to 7 of the original developers blogs?
It’s the ultimate back link strategy. Why did they do that? Why haven’t others done it as well?
See your permalink page now for example:
/wordpress-the_tags-is-missing-nofollow/
Fancy URL’s. They were doing that years ago before it became mainstream in other cms/blogs.
The title linking to itself in the permalink page.
That’s a standard feature in the default wordpress theme for years now.
The list goes on.
They’ve quietly parlayed everything they’ve done into wordpress.com which is now one of the biggest sites on the internet. No hype. No extensive PR.
Just word of mouth and search results. And I’d say the demographic that uses wordpress.com.
wordpress.com is only two years old as of August and gets 300 million monthly page views.
It has a fraction of the members of myspace but has almost as many indexed pages.
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:31 pm
It’s nice that WordPress.com is benefiting from their footer links, but the smaller sites that use WordPress don’t have those template links and they need some better on-site SEO.
Link popularity outweighs less-than-ideal on-site SEO.
(Didn’t Photo Matt condemn WP template linking recently?)
November 5th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Oh well… at least it will be possible to fix that for people who don’t like to fiddle with their robots.txt by writing a plugin.
November 5th, 2007 at 3:39 am
Link popularity by itself is way overrated.
Onsite makes a big difference once you have the links going.
Regularly updated with unique content (not rehashed but actual unique content) is of far greater importance now.
Also the level of multi media in your site is of importance.
Images, Videos, Audio etc are now all part of the al gore rhythm.
November 6th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I totally agree that Wordpress needs to work more with seo specialist. The other thing I found are h1, h2 links. h1 and h2 should not be used as a links. I’ve just upgraded one of my blogs to Wordpress 2.3.1 besides user-friendliness nothing major has changed. Before you install it make sure you’ll read CHMOD setting.
November 11th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I agree 100%. Another thing that pisses me off is that you can’t have more than one line break in between paragraphs. O that gets me angry, you would think that such a widely used cms there would be an easy way to just hit enter a couple times to add more space between paragraphs or pictures. This is really overlooked and just plain stupid.