Successful WordPress SEO and Internet Marketing

PageRank sculpting is a SEO tactic that requires adding the nofollow attribute that makes PageRank flow unnecessary. This helps stop your pages from giving away their PageRank unnecessarily. As stated in Google’s webmaster documentation the use of the nofollow attribute is very much permitted.

PageRank sculpting can greatly aid your search engine rankings; don’t spend a lot of time on it unless you understand the basics of WordPress SEO.

To get started, download and install these important plugins:

1. WordPress Tweaks

2. WP SEO Master

3. Robots Meta

For Firefox users, the nofollow-highlighting functionality of the SearchStatus can be useful.

After getting those plugins installed, we can now check where your PageRank may be unnecessarily leaking.

Pages —Some pages are not needed in the ranking in search engines. You can use the WP SEO Master plugin for this. Go to “WP SEO Master” section, click “Nofollow” in the submenu, and ensure “Enable Nofollow Module” box is checked; then click the “Pages” tab. There, specify nofollow options for each page.

Sidebar category links —Categories lists on your sidebar can pull PageRank from your site. Posts should rank more than the categories. Just go to the “Nofollow” section in “WP SEO Master,” check off “Nofollow Category Links,” then click “Update Options.”

Sidebar tag cloud links —Tags can pullPageRank as well. Use my WordPress Tweaks plugin to fix this. Go to Settings > Tweaks, go to the “Nofollow” section, check off “Add to tag cloud links,” and click “Update Options.”

Meta links —“Register” and “Login” pages don’t need PageRanks. You can fix this with either WordPress Tweaks. In WordPress Tweaks, go to Settings > Tweaks, then check off “Add to the ‘Register’ and ‘Login’ links” under “Nofollow.”

Blogroll links —Blogroll links are site wide, and can point to external websites. To nofollow these, go to WP SEO Master > Nofollow and check off “Nofollow Blogroll Links.”

Other sidebar links —Sidebar links can be nofollow’d, like links to your RSS feed. By using widgets, go to Design > Widgets and search your text widgets for links to which to add nofollow.

Footer links —You can go to Design > Theme Editor > Footer and nofollow links like www.wordpress.org.

Secondary post links —You only need to pass PageRank to your posts once. For WordPress Tweaks plugin, go to Settings > Tweaks, go to the “Nofollow” section, and check off “Add to post comment links” and “Add to ‘Read more’ links.”

Post links on the homepage —Ranking well and having links as credit is essential. Robots Meta provides a good compromise: “Nofollow outbound links on the frontpage,” found under the “Internal nofollow settings” section.

Category/tag links for posts —Robots Meta gives settings that stop PageRank flow to taxonomy pages: “Nofollow category listings on pages,” “Nofollow category listings on single posts,” and “Nofollow the links to your tag pages.”

Comment permalinks —For numerous comments, go to Design > Theme Editor > Comments and add nofollow to your comment permalinks, this may look similar to:

<a href=”#comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>”>

Miscellaneous links —Check other possible nofollow candidates, like link-based social media widgets. Firefox extensions can come in handy here. Don’t worry about JavaScript-generated links, and that some links created by plugins that can’t be nofollow’d unless the plugin gives you the option to do so.

Unfortunately there are still links that can’t be nofollowed without modifying the core WordPress code, these are:

1. Links to date-based archives

2. Next/previous post links

3. Post pagination links

Luckily, WordPress 2.5.2 will allow plugins to add nofollow to items #1 and #2.

Hopefully this guide will help you in controlling the PageRank flow of your WordPress blog.