A Wordpress NoFollow Experiment

I would like to start this post by admitting that I went against the NoFollow recommendedation in Danny Dover’s excellent SEOmoz post “SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz’s New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data”

I also flew somewhat against the wind being generated by Great Scott’s great post “Whiteboard Friday – Matt Cutts on NoFollow”

I can hear your thoughts beaming through the wonderful interweb;

“What would cause someone to swim against the current, then emerge dripping wet and proceed head first down a NoFollow hole?”

My reasons were a combination of intrigue, traffic-leaching-greed and Thursday evening boredome and they led me to begin my Wordpress “nofollow” experiment! On Thursday, Aug 6th I started using the SEOmoz Toolbar to check which links on my pages were tagged with the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

The screenshot below shows a typical post from one of my blogs with the SEOmoz Toolbar set to “Show Nofollows”;

I’ve highlighted (the red-dashed line rectangle) the only area of my post which was previously set to use NoFollow, they are all image links to social bookmarking sites and the nofollow attribute was set by that particular social bookmarking wordpress plugin, i.e. My NoFollow energy expended had been virtually zero up to this point!

WARNING: The NoFollow changes that I made were implemented on a Wordpress blog using a modified version of the “Poetry” theme and as such may be useless for anyone not running a Wordpress blog. With the disclaimer out of the way lets move on to the meaty stuff!

So here we go, these are the changes I made and the results;

1. The “Read More” links within my wordpress install were not set to nofollow so I addressed that one first, I opened the “/wp-includes/post-template.php” for editing and added the rel=”nofollow” to the following line of code
   • $output .= apply_filters( ‘the_content_more_link’, ‘ rel=”nofollow”>$more_link_text“,
     • 
2. I recently started using the Google Ajax Translation tool on my site and noticed that the “Translate” links currently a bag full of follow! I edited the “wp-content/plugins/google-ajax-translation/ajaxtranslation.php” file making the following changes;
   • ‘ . ($this -> before_translate) . ($this -> translate_message[$browser_lg]) . ($this -> after_translate) . ‘ languages[$lg] . ‘”>
3. I am hoping that every post on my blog gets comments, and plenty of them, but I saw that the “Please Leave a Comment” link needed some nofollow training so I modified the “wp-includes/comment-template.ph” file as such;
   • function comments_popup_link( $zero = false, $one = false, $more = false, $css_class = ”, $none = false, $nofollow = true )
   • $title = esc_attr( get_the_title() );    if($nofollow) { $nofollow = ‘ rel=”nofollow”‘;}    echo apply_filters( ‘comments_popup_link_attributes’, ” );
     • 
4. I also dug a little deeper into my theme “poetry” and edited the “wp-content/themes/poetry/comments.php” file;
   • rel=”nofollow”>

   This fixed the “Leave a Comment” section underneath my posts so I know I’m on the right track!

I also changed some code to set the post author link to nofollow and my average post now looks like this;

So how did I track the results??? Well, and this is going to garner criticism, on the same day as making all of the above nofollow changes I also changed my META titles to include the title of the post first then my blog title. (Previously it was the blog title then the title of the post.)

Changing the order of the META title allowed me to actively track how many of my currently indexed pages had been re-indexed at any point in time, e.g. I would go to Google and search for “site:www.oureverydayearth.com” and see how many of the page titles had been converted from the Blog Title >> Post Title format to the Post Title | Blog Title format, the screenshot below shows an example of both the old and the new;

I waited until all of my websites pages had been re-indexed and monitored traffic coming into my site during the interim and here are the results;

The blue line shows the most recent traffic and the green line shows the comparison to last month. I’m clearly receiving much more traffic, especially over the past two weeks. Here are some more stats;

1. Number of visits up +45% (Woohoo!)
2. Number of pageviews per visit down -2% (my favorite addition to my morning latte!)
3. Number of pages per visit down -33% (Ouch!)
4. Bounce rate up +20% (Not good)
5. Average time on site down -48%(Not good at all!)
6. Percentage of new visits up +25% (Finally some more good news)

So as you can see, although the great experiment increased the number of visits to my site, I still have alot of work to do in trying to retain visitors and keep them interested. I have read several posts regarding improving page load time and I think that will be my next target, maybe if I can speed up the page load times then people will be more inclined to surf through our catalog of articles 🙂

You can view my site below;

Our Everyday Earth – Green Blog

And yes, I am desperately hoping my link above will not be set to NoFollow (Is that a double negative?). Please let me know your thoughts;

1. Was my experiment valid, does it really show an improvement using NoFollow?
2. Do you think I could have tested this in a better way?
3. Should I really be writing an article about NoFollow at 6AM???

Thanks for reading, Martin.