The Ultimate PageRank Sculpting Guide for WordPress SEO

PageRank sculpting is an SEO tactic that involves adding the nofollow attribute to links for which PageRank flow is not necessary.

PageRank sculpting is important because it helps stop your pages from giving away their PageRank unnecessarily. It is particularly beneficial for WordPress blogs, since they have a multitude of taxonomy/archive pages that can pull PageRank from the rest of your site.

This tactic of using nofollow on internal links is entirely approved by Google, as stated in their webmaster documentation:

Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.

So while PageRank sculpting can help your search engine rankings (by better indicating to Google what pages you’d like to see rank well), you shouldn’t spend a lot of time on it unless you have other WordPress SEO basics covered.

To begin, you’ll need to download and install the following 3 plugins:

1. WordPress Tweaks
2. WP SEO Master
3. Robots Meta

If you’re a Firefox user, the nofollow-highlighting functionality of the SearchStatus or NoDoFollow extensions will also be useful.

Got those 3 WordPress plugins installed, and a Firefox extension if you want it? Good; now we’ll take a thorough look at where your PageRank may be leaking unnecessarily.

1. Pages — There are some pages (such as your Contact page) that you probably wouldn’t want ranking in the search engines. Why send PageRank to them? We’ll use the WP SEO Master plugin for this one. Go to the “WP SEO Master” section, click “Nofollow” in the submenu, ensure the “Enable Nofollow Module” box is checked, and then click the “Pages” tab. From there, you can specify nofollow options for each individual page.

2. Sidebar category links — If you show your categories list in your sidebar, they’re pulling PageRank from your entire site. We want our posts to rank more than we do our categories. Just go to the “Nofollow” section in “WP SEO Master,” check off “Nofollow Category Links,” and click “Update Options.”

3. Sidebar tag cloud links — Tags are even worse than categories because there are usually a lot more of them! We’ll need to use my WordPress Tweaks plugin to fix this leak. Go to Settings > Tweaks, go to the “Nofollow” section, check off “Add to tag cloud links,” and click “Update Options.”

4. Meta links — Two pages that really don’t need PageRank are your “Register” and “Login” pages. (Why would you want your login form showing up in search results?) You can achieve this with either WordPress Tweaks or the Robots Meta plugin. In WordPress Tweaks, go to Settings > Tweaks, then check off “Add to the ‘Register’ and ‘Login’ links” under “Nofollow.” For Robots Meta, go to Plugins > Robots Meta, then check off “Nofollow login and registration links” under “Internal nofollow settings.”

5. Blogroll links — Blogroll links are sitewide, and on top of that usually point to external websites. To nofollow these, go to WP SEO Master > Nofollow and check off “Nofollow Blogroll Links.”

6. Other sidebar links — There are usually other sidebar links that can be nofollow’d, such as links to your RSS feed. If you use widgets, go to Design > Widgets and search your text widgets for links to which to add nofollow. If you don’t use widgets, go to Design > Theme Editor > Sidebar and do the same.

7. Footer links — You can also go to Design > Theme Editor > Footer and nofollow links like www.wordpress.org (it already has a whoppin’ PageRank 9, after all).

8. Secondary post links — By default, WordPress links to each post two or three times every time it’s shown. You really only need to pass PageRank to your posts once. To do so with the 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.” (Robots Meta also has similar functionality for the former.)

9. Post links on the homepage — We really want our site to rank well, but at the same time we probably want links in our posts to carry credit. Robots Meta provides a good compromise: “Nofollow outbound links on the frontpage,” found under the “Internal nofollow settings” section.

10. Category/tag links for posts — Robots Meta also provides the following settings to further stop PageRank flow to your taxonomy pages: “Nofollow category listings on pages,” “Nofollow category listings on single posts,” and “Nofollow the links to your tag pages.” These settings apply to the category/tag links that appear alongside your posts (usually at the bottom). Note that if you want your categories and tags to have any PageRank at all, you should choose either this approach or the sidebar approach (tips 2 and 3), but not both methods.

11. Comment permalinks — If you have a lot of comments, it may be helpful to go to Design > Theme Editor > Comments and add nofollow to your comment permalinks, the beginning of which look similar to:
    <a href="#comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">

12. Miscellaneous links — Also check the rest of your template for other possible nofollow candidates, like link-based social media widgets. This is where those Firefox extensions can come in handy. Note that you don’t need to worry about JavaScript-generated links, and that some links created by plugins (like related posts lists) can’t be nofollow’d unless the plugin gives you the option or you edit the plugin code yourself.

And while we’re add it, we can stop giving juice to the PageRank monster thanks to the Wikipedia Nofollow plugin.

As detailed as this list may be, unfortunately there are still links that we aren’t yet able to nofollow without modifying the core WordPress code:

1. Links to date-based (e.g. monthly) archives
2. Next/previous post links (usually found before and/or after the post content on single post pages)
3. Post pagination links (like “Older posts” and “Newer posts,” etc.)

These links are out of the reach of plugins, so to speak. However, I’ve pushed to have that changed in WordPress 2.5.2, and lo and behold, WordPress 2.5.2 will indeed allow plugins to add nofollow to items #1 and #2. (The Trac ticket for #3 is still pending; if you have a WordPress.org username, express your support!)

I hope this guide assisted you in better controlling the PageRank flow of your WordPress blog! If you have additional ideas or pointers, feel free to submit a comment! Enjoy!