Google PR, Nofollow & Wordpress Self Pings

Google PR, Nofollow & Wordpress Self Pings

By now everybody knows internal linking is very important – it gives you a chance to add keywords into your link profile and lets users navigate your website via contextual links. Wordpress self ping trackbacks in comments (nofollowed by default) are a different beast though and if we are to believe the recent announcement on how Google treats nofollow links they might actually be sucking the PR right out of your blog.

I was reading a blog earlier today and noticed they’d self pinged an article about 50 times from their own blog posts!

If Google is treating nofollow as Pagerank sinkholes, why introduce 50 nofollowed links to a page that does not need them via trackbacks from your own blog that dissipate Google Pagerank?

Crazy stuff.

There might be an excuse for nofollowing external links in blog comments, (although we do not, using Hobo Linky Love)but surely not internals?

Advice – keep the comment area for comments, turn self pings off in Wordpress with no self pings and conserve Pagerank pr link juice or whatever it is we’re working with these days, so you get more of your pages into Google.

QUICK TIP – Want to remove those trackbacks from posts? It’s easy, just go to your Wordpress Admin panel, go to Comments, and search for “[...]” and you’ll see all the trackbacks you have and you can choose what to remove.

PS For beginners – What is a self ping? It’s when you link to a post on your own blog, and you get a trackback in the comments.

Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)