Ouch: A Google -20 Penalty for WordPress Blogroll Links
How painful. I’ve just noticed a nasty -20 overnight penalty for the new blogroll I’ve implemented, which lists all of the social networking sites I use. Now, “Pixelrage.net” appears somewhere at the end of page 3 for the keyword “Pixelrage.” Let that be a lesson: if you’re going to use the blogroll or link list features, make sure you download a plugin that will convert them to “nofollow.”
I’m going to chalk this up as stupidity on my part – I should have known that WordPress has left those links as “dofollow,” and I should have either coded in the rel=nofollow myself, or looked for the plugin. All I can do now is remedy this issue, ping, and hope for the best. I’m not even going to complain about how horribly boneheaded, stupid, ridiculous and careless WordPress was for not at least giving us a “nofollow” check box option for our blogroll.
If you’ve stumbled upon this post looking for a WordPress plugin that converts the blogroll to “nofollow” links, here you go.
I always tend to learn lessons the hard way, anyway :/
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- Oct 25, 2009: Don’t Forget to NoFollow Your Old Work | Pixelrage.net
I don’t get it. Why would Google penalize you like that? It’s just some links, not like you’ve opened a link farm…
My guess are too many outbound links (around 20) at one time, all left as dofollow. Check out the WP plugin for the nofollow blogroll plugin – it looks like that plugin was created for this exact purpose!