How to Add Nofollow Links in WordPress (Simple Guide for Beginners)

August 30. 2020

Knowing different types of links is important when taking care of your WordPress website. But, it’s also important knowing how to add a certain type of link. Before getting to how to add nofollow links in WordPress, let’s see what a nofollow link is and why it is important for SEO.

What are nofollow links?

Boosting the SEO of a website is something all website owners strive to. And links are important factors that affect the search engine ranking. When you link to a website, the search engine pass a part of link authority from your site to a site you’re linking to. However, you don’t have control over the websites you’re linking to, so it’s common in the world of SEO to make these links nofollow links. These links inform search engines that you do not want to pass link authority from your website to another website you’re linking to.

The importance of nofollow links

We’ve mentioned that anytime you link to a website, search engines pass a part of link authority, and this is what is called “link juice.” By passing “link juice” to another website, you’re giving it a “vote” and you’re informing search engines that these websites are important to you. This is the reason why websites want to get quality backlinks. But, sometimes, you want to allow link on your website, without search engines passing it your “link juice.” The most basic example is when users comment on your blog and put links in their comments. Since you don’t know if these sites are authoritative, for a matter of fact, they’re probably not, you’ll avoid consequences from the SEO aspect, by making them nofollow.

You’ll find out that adding nofollow links in WordPress is not hard. It’s actually quite easier than learning how to display breadcrumb navigation links and some other important things you do on your WordPress website.

How to Check if a Link is Nofollow?

If a link contains this rel=”nofollow”  attribute, the links is a nofollow link. You can find more on attribute values here. But right here, will focus on the nofollow atribute. In order to check if a link is a nofollow link, right-click on it, and choose Inspection. You will see the HTML code on the right side of your screen. So you just need to see if there’s a nofollow attribute or not.

How to add nofollow links in WordPress

It’s easy to add nofollow links in WordPress, even without any plugins. While plugins make things more convenient, they’re usually intuitive and easy to use. For this reason, we won’t talk about particular plugin that you can use for adding nofollow links. What you can do yourself is:

• add nofollow links in Gutenberg
• add nofollow links in Classic editor
• manually add nofollow links in WordPress

As you can see, sometimes you don’t need a plugin or a tool to do something on your WP website. But, if you don’t want to make these changes by yourself, our team is there for you. 

Gutenberg

Gutenberg is new in WordPress, so if you still have old plugins you use for nofollow links, there’s a good chance the won’t work. That’s why we’ll go through the process of adding nofollow links in Gutenberg manually.

• got to Posts and select Add new
• after selecting the text you want to add a link to, select the anchor icon
• in the new field, just paste your link, and you will create a link
• now, choose this block and click on 3 dots at the top and go to Edit as HTML
• in case you see the rel=”noopener noreferrer” attribute, just add a space after noreferrer, if not, skip this
• simply add the nofllow attribute to your link

Classic Editor

Some users still find Classic Editor more convenient. Unlike in Gutenberg, here you can easily use a plugin to add a nofollow links in WordPress. With users who aren’t savy with coding, plugins are an easier way to go. Usually, with a plugin, the only hard work you need to do is create a link. Then, you just need to is open the gear icon and make this link nofollow.

How to manually add nofollow links in WordPress

Now you know that adding nofollow links in Gutenberg is no big deal. But, this is useful only if you need to make some of you link nofollow. But if you have a lot of links you want to make nofollow on your page, switch to the Code Editor and make this process much easier. When you click on the three dots on the top-right, you will see the Code editor option. Once you see the HTML code, you just need to add the attribute to the link you want to make nofollow. After you exit the Code Editor, you’ll return to the visual editor.

WordPress menus

Some site owners want to add external links to the navigation menu. While this is fairly easy, if you’ve never done it before, you might need a bit of guidance.

On the left sidebar, click on Appearance and choose Menus. After choosing the menu where you want to add the links, you’ll find Custom Links under menu items you can add. Just add the link text and the link, and add it to the menu. As a result, you’ll see an external link in the Menu Structure.

Now, select Screen Options at the top-right and tick the Links Relationship (XFN) box and Link Target box. Then, scrool down to the Menu Item and expand the External Link item. Just write down nofollow in the Link Relationshop(XFN) field to make the link nofollow. Finally, don’t forget to save the Menu.

Final Thoughts on How to Add Nofollow Links in WordPress

Links are an important part of SEO. This is why you need to take care of the links on your website, check and fix broken links and make sure that appropriate links are made into nofollow links. Taking care of your website this way can affect your SEO ranking. So, are you ready to add nofollow links in WordPress yourself?