MacBros' Place |

If you were with me on the money train, when sponsored posts were just hitting the scene. You were enjoying every minute and the cash flow was awesome! Especially if you had a PR of 5 or more like I did.

But all of a sudden, Google decided to slap all of us around for making money from advertisers instead of using their AdSence service. At least that’s the way it felt anyway. But the truth of the matter was that we were all breaking Google’s TOS with link farming tactics and didn’t really know about it. At least I didn’t know. But it was in their TOS about using the rel=”nofollow” when linking to other sites, especially when you were being paid for them. Google wants people to link to other sites without being paid, so the PR is true as far as popularity goes. At least that’s the way I understand it anyway.

So here we are. PR stripped away like the rank from a soldiers sleeve. How humiliating right? If we only knew in advance. Or if we were aware in advance. OK, if I wasn’t so stupid, I would have added the rel=”nofollow” tag OK!! There. I’m an idiot, and I’m paying the price for it now.

Some have went as far as deleting all their old sponsored posts, since most were OK to delete after 30 days with most sites, but advertisers really want them permanent and I don’t blame them. Some have also gone as far as adding the rel=”nofollow” tag to all their posts manually. Seems like a lot of work if you ask me, especially when I have over 2,400 pages to sift through!

You know what? There’s an easier way. Thanks to Miak there’s a plugin that will take care of all that for you with a simple click of the mouse.

With Miak’s No Follow Links In Posts plug-in, you can have Wordpress automatically add the rel=”nofollow’ tag to your posts that are an X amount of days old. I have mine set to 31 days now. Because there are a few advertisers that don’t like the rel=”nofollow” tag on their sponsored posts, even though I’ll be steering clear of them in the future, but if I do have one, they’ll get 31 days without it. Thanks to SocialSpark, that’s not a problem as it is mandatory to have rel=”nofollow” in all the links.

INSTALLING IT AND USING IT:

Click to Embiggen’

When you upload it to your Wordpress plugin directory and activate it, you simply go to the settings screen and select the (1) ‘Nofollow Links in Post’ link and (2) add how many days old the post needs to be before the rel=”nofollow” tag is added. I enabled (3)‘individual posts to override….’ option so I can choose to leave out the rel=”nofollow” tag in links to sites I do not wish to have the tag. You can choose (4)what categories you want the plugin to apply the rel=”nofollow” tag to also.

click to Embiggen’

(5) This is the place in the Write Post screen that gives you the option of leaving out the rel=”nofollow” tag alltogether. This is when you choose to enable (3).

There’s only one downfall with this in the future. The advertisers that paid to have the nofollow tag in their post will still likely add a ban on you from taking any more of their opportunities. So that’s something you might want to consider when using this on those type of opportunities.

Nofollow Links in Posts plugin enables you to add the “nofollow” attribute into links in a post within a specified category.

This plugin is useful if you are doing sponsored posts. You can set the plugin to add rel=”nofollow” into links in posts older than “X” days.

Currently, the plugin only works with Wordpress 2.5+. There are no plans yet in making this plugin compatible with prior versions of Wordpress.

Get the plugin by simply clicking on over to TheMiak.com. If you can spare a few extra bucks or some change, send it over their way to thank them for a great plugin that will more than likely save you a shitload of time, and possibly getting your old PR rank back again too.

I also found that in aincent times I also added some text stating the post was a paid review or a sponsored post, I didn’t want to go through all my posts and manually edit them all so I looked for an easier way and found Search and Replace. I just recommend you backup your SQL Database as this edits it directly and there’s no way to undo the changes should it crap out on you.