Link Juice Plugin

Apr 5th, 2009 Wordpress 3 Comment

I personally would not want to give away my site “link juice” by passing it onto other sites, or duplicating posts. I understand the meaning of “giving something back”, giving away link power for free to anyone isn’t really an option.

About Link Juice

Each site created has it’s own “value”. The more links you have, especially from well-linked places, the greater your visibility and web page rankings become – hence passing on “juice”. A recent trends is to give away link power from people that ping certain articles or from people who leave a comment (via CommentLuv, Dofollow links and so on).

The best way to not pass “link juice” to a site you are linking to is to add rel=”nofollow” via HTML code and inserting no spider links in the Meta Head tag area, but this involves site editing and is also time consuming. My link juice plugin fixes these problems and more!

Using the Link Juice Plugin

The plugin is designing to place noFollow tags on Category pages, external links in the Sidebar and also stops the problem of duplicate posts by removing the ability to self-ping own posts.

Download the Wordpress Plugin

1. Unzip the downloaded package
2. Upload the folder with all files to the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory
3. Activate the ‘WP Link Juice Plugin’ plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Download WP Link Juice Plugin 1kb

What are the benefits of using this Plugin

By restricting where link juice is following, the spiders should place more emphasis on following your actual post pages.

Why restrict Categories

In placing nofollow tags to category pages, we are removing the ability to duplicate posts. The site already duplicates content via sitemap, monthly archive pages, tag pages and if you’ve got it installed, related posts.

Why restrict External Links in the Sidebar

In Wordpress, this is called Bookmark links. Perhaps they contain links to friends or favourite sites, but again like the Category pages, they’ll be on every page of your blog posts…again filtering down link juice when it could be used on your own site.

Why restrict Self Pinged Posts

The ability to ping is useful, but if you refer to your own posts in another article, chances are you’ll get a ping back. Google looks down on too much “self promotion”, if you ping too many of your own internal posts it could effect your Page Ranking. *Note, once the plugin is installed it will only cover any new trackbacks/pings, previous trackbacks and pings will still be on the site.

Where should my link juice be going?

I’d personally make a “Tags” section on your site and/or promote the site’s internal sitemap. This way spiders can see exactly what content is on the site, how much is there and has a location to check for new site additions.

I also wanted to add to the plugin to take into certain Pages on sites, such as “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, “Terms and Conditions” or “Contact Us”. These pages do not need to be spidered as they give no real valuable content, the most valuable section of your site are the posts.

How did you get on?

I’ve tested this on versions 1 of WP to the latest version and it works fine. Site owners shouldn’t expect instant results, but will see long term benefits later on.