About this plugin

Summary

NoFollowr allows an administrator to easily see which external links are granting search-engine benefits upon another site. The administrator can toggle between allowing and disallowing this benefit with a single click. The change is instant and does not require a page reload, making the moderation of external links a breeze.

How it works

When logged in as an administrator, green “tick” and red “stop” icons appear next to all external links in a post indicating whether rel="nofollow" is currently applied to them. Simply click an icon to toggle between these two states and alter the link's nofollow status. This change is remotely reflected in the database without requiring a page reload.

Why is this plugin useful?

The whole question of whether to use rel="nofollow" is a hotly debated one, and applying it (or not) across the board is not a good solution. You want to give credit where it is due and reward useful websites but, at the same time, you do not want to reward suspect websites that promote unethical or unscrupulous behaviour. Read more about how nofollow is extremely important when engaging in activism.

If you are not the sole author of your website or blog it can be very difficult to stay on top of which links are being followed. NoFollowr allows you to easily spot and alter which links receive your love, without spending time going back and forth between your site and the admin area to edit the posts manually.

Installation instructions

The easiest way to install NoFollowr is to do so from within your site’s admin area:

1. Search for it from your admin plugin page and click “Install Now”
2. From the resulting installation page, wait until you see the “Activate Plugin” link, then click it. NoFollowr is now fully operational and requires no further setup.

Otherwise, the installation process is as follows:

1. Download NoFollowr.zip
2. Expand the zip archive and copy the entire folder named “nofollowr” to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder within your WordPress installation
3. Login to your the admin area of your site and go to the plugins section
4. Find NoFollowr in the list and click its “Activate” link. NoFollowr is now fully operational and requires no further setup. If you need more help installing the plugin I recommend you follow this step-by-step beginners guide

To avoid problems, I advise only using one nofollow plugin at a time.

Usage instructions

Once you have activated NoFollowr, browse your public facing website and notice that every external link within each post now has a green tick or red stop icon appended to it. The tick icon means that you are allowing search-engines to follow the link and to bestow pagerank benefits upon the linked site. The stop icon means that the link has the rel="nofollow" attribute applied to it, meaning that you do not want to confer the link benefits to the site in question.

To change the nofollow status of any of the links, simply click its icon and in about one second it will change to indicate that the link’s rel attribute has been altered within the database. No page refresh is necessary, so you can continue moderating other links straight away.

1. Click the green tick icon next to a link that goes to a dodgy website:
   
2. Admire the spinning animation for half a second or so while the database is updated:
   
3. The link now has a red icon, indicating rel="nofollow" is applied to it (and altered in the database). Search-engines will not count this link as a recommendation:
   

Support for NoFollowr

If you find any issues with this plugin, please don’t hesitate to let me know on the support forum.

I find this plugin useful and I hope other people do too. However, I do not accept any responsibility for any problems that may occur from the use of NoFollowr. Remember to regularly back up your database, and enjoy!

If you would like to show your appreciation, here is a donate link. Oh, and I love you.