Member Avatar for geekazine

I run a weekly podcast in where during the show notes, I link to other sites' news articles. Except in cases where it may look like advertising, I don't put in a "Nofollow" on the links.

I am not sure if this is helping or hurting my PageRank. My only concern is since May I have a PR of 2. I would at least like to see it at 4.

My site is a Wordpress Blog and I do have the SEO tools plugin installed.

My Question is: Should I be "nofollow"ing these links? Is there a quick block code for nofollow? Of course, due to forum rules I cannot post my website up here, but any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Jeff

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Short answer: for editorial show notes that cite reputable news articles, do not blanket nofollow them. Editorial outbound links are normal and user-helpful; nofollow (and the newer rel values) are meant for paid/sponsored links or untrusted/user-submitted content. Also note that search engines now treat rel="nofollow" more like a hint and you should prefer rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated items when appropriate.

is right to steer attention back to content — visible PageRank is a noisy, slow metric. Leaving a reasonable number of editorial links to authoritative sources rarely "hurts" your site. If the concern is link volume per episode, consider a single curated "show notes" page per episode or archive pages that consolidate links so you keep internal linking strong.

If a selective, automatic approach is wanted in WordPress, add a filter that tags external anchors with rel="nofollow" (place in a child theme functions.php or a site-specific plugin). Example:

function add_nofollow_to_external_links($content) {
    if (is_feed() || is_admin() || empty($content)) return $content;
    $site_host = parse_url(get_home_url(), PHP_URL_HOST);
    if (!$site_host) return $content;
    libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
    $dom = new DOMDocument();
    $dom->loadHTML('<?xml encoding="utf-8">' . $content);
    foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('a') as $a) {
        $href = $a->getAttribute('href');
        if (!$href) continue;
        $host = parse_url($href, PHP_URL_HOST);
        if ($host && stripos($host, $site_host) === false) {
            $rel = $a->getAttribute('rel');
            $rels = preg_split('/\s+/', $rel, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
            if (!in_array('nofollow', $rels)) {
                $rels[] = 'nofollow';
                $a->setAttribute('rel', trim(implode(' ', $rels)));
            }
        }
    }
    $html = $dom->saveHTML();
    $body = preg_replace('~^.*?<body>(.*)</body>.*?$~is', '$1', $html);
    return $body;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'add_nofollow_to_external_links', 20);

Test on a staging site, clear caches, and avoid applying this to internal links or to links you deliberately want to credit. Measure real impact with analytics and Search Console rather than obsessing over the toolbar PageRank number.

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Member Avatar for canadafred

Forget about PageRank and acquiring PR value for your web pages. Pagerank is but one of many indicators the search engine uses in determining positioning of webpages in the search results.

Concentrate on improving your web site's contents. Grow your web site steadily.

Member Avatar for geekazine

I really can do both. PageRank can be a good tool if you embrace it a bit. I don't worry about it too much, but I know it can give me an indication of whether my site needs more attention.

So would you nofollow show notes?

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