Does Having Lots Of DoFollow Links Mean Your Page Rank Could Be Penalized?

This seems to be an unanswered question dating back to the beginning of 2007  and before. Many people have talked about loosing page rank due to outgoing links in case they were paid links, but personally I have not been affected.

As of today this site is a page rank 3 and nothing has changed with regards to dofollow and nofollow in my links. At present only my recent comments are nofollow and this is only on the home page (index page).

As it is supposed to be better for you to have no dofollow links on your site except on your home page I thought I would try an experiment with one of my niche blog sites.

So I did everything I could except make my blogroll links nofollow. I did the normal thing and did a google search for an answer, but only got details on how to change files to allow you to tick a box for the links to be nofollow. I did not want to do that as apart from it being too time consuming it means changing the relevant file every time there is an upgrade and at the moment there seem to be quite a few.

My next stop was the plugin directory at wordpress.org and here, after ploughing through a bunch of completely irrelevant plugins I found the right one by a guy called Andrew Shell. You can read about the plugin directly on his blog (click on his name). It is a simple plugin that does the job perfectly, with no bells and whistles, which is to let you select which blogroll links you want to be nofollow.

So the next time you are searching google for how to do something in wordpress and the answer is not forthcoming, think about the wordpress plugin direcory as although there is a minefield of plugins, there is more than likely one that will do the job for you.

I did think about doing one post about my favourite plugins, but I have so many it is hard to choose my favourite, so at some point I will set up a category and write about each one as and when I find them.

What is your favourite wordpress plugin? If you could have a plugin made for you what would you want it to do? As always leave your comments below.