'No Follow' and 'Do Follow' links when using WordPress plugins

[Hermski]

Hi all

I hope someone can help me out with the following question in regards to 'no follow' and 'do follow' links in combination with WordPress plugins.

Some plugins that deal with links i.e. link masking or SEO plugins do give you the option to 'not follow' links. Can someone speak from experience that this does actually work??

It's really quite stupid, but only occurred to me that when using the FireFox add on 'NoDoFollow' as well as looking at the SEOmoz link profile of course, 95% of my links are actually marked as FOLLOW, while the opposite should be the case. For example I mark about 90% of outgoing links as no follow within a link masking plugin.

Well, why would WordPress plugins give you the option to mark links as no follow in the first place when they do in fact appear as follow for search engines and SEOmoz? Is this a WordPress thing or whatnot? Maybe they are in fact no follow, and the information supplied by SEO tools comes from the basic HTML structure analysis. I don't know...

This really got me worried. Hope someone can shed a light. All the best and many thanks for your answers!

[David_ODonnell]

Not sure why you would want to nofollow 95% of your outgoing links, might throw up some red flags, but sounds like the plugin you are using to nofollow may not actually be working. Have you tried adding the html manually to the links?

[Hermski]

Hi David

Thanks for your answer! Well, it's only outgoing affiliate links that shall not pass on link juice. All internal links do follow. Well, one of the masking plugins is Pretty Link, so not an unknown one when it comes to WordPress plugins (the actual tick box description for not following a link says "Add a nofollow and noindex to this link's http redirect header". Not sure what redirect header is supposed to mean.

No, I haven't added the nofollow manually as I though the plugin would sort it out

Silly question, but can I assume that a no follow link is ONLY REALLY no follow when you can tell by the actual source code (i.e. when you check the source code of a website and a link clearly states rel=nofollow) or may there be some robots.txt or scripts going on in the background that tell search engines regardless??

The more I think about it, the more confusing it seems to get.

Thanks for the answers!

[MoosaHemani]

Wordpress is awesome but obviously there are tons of shitty plug-in that can kill your website big time like you said... from the explanation you have provided in your questions... It clearly seems like the plugin is not working for you...

Personally, I always check links if they are no follow or do follow from SEOmoz toolbar and don’t really use any plugin for no following any link... I would prefer to manually add a single line of code in the page/post instead of using any plugin... this will kill any problem and give me the 100% result.

The single line code for no following any link is 

Link text

[Hermski]

Thanks for your reply Moosa!

The author of the WP plugin has responded to me with the following:

Pretty Link does send a nofollow/noindex in the http header of the request (you won't see it in the HTML because its sent with the http request).

I don't think he's making things up, at the same time I'm not code savvy enough to confirm it. What do you think? One or the other way, I will also follow the hard coded no follow from now on.

Just to wrap it up. If by any chance, all outgoing links are still FOLLOW, I believe it would be the wrong move and suspicious to search engines, if I went out now NO following all links that there are in the site. Correct?

Thanks again for your help!