I noticed a few days ago that the pagerank for BlogTactics.com has suddenly dropped to zero, and as the site has far more links to it than it did in the last PR update, I guess the “mighty Giigle”, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that I’m selling posts or links on this blog..

They’re wrong, I’ve never sold any posts, reviews or links on this blog, I don’t even have any “paid” advertisments, but it seems that doesn’t really matter to them.

I assume it’s probably because my blogroll links didn’t have the rel=”nofollow” tag on them, so in their “all knowing wisdom” they’ve come to the conclusion that they must be paid links.

They’re not for course, they are in fact links to other sites of mine that are related to this blog, and to other sites that have useful resources and services that I use and recommend. It’s called affiliate marketing, but perhaps “Giigle” have decided to start penalizing affiliate marketers too, or maybe they just don’t like to see anyone other than themselves making money from a website..  

anyway, what I think of their current stance is irrelevant if I want to get the PR back, which I’m going to “try”, as it’s still seen as a form of “social proof” for the value of a site.

so I decided to add the rel=”nofollow” tag to all my blogroll links and submit a reinclusion request, but I then discovered that WordPress doesn’t include an easy way to make blogroll link ‘nofollow’ed.

There are a whole bunch of other “XFN” relationship tags available, but non of them are going to help with getting my PR re-instated, so I went looking for a solution.

I found one on the KnowledgeConstructs.com blog from a very switched on guy called Zain.

it’s a pretty simple wordpress hack, and it must be simple as I managed to do it myself without messing anything up.

I thought that I’d do a video showing just how to use Zain’s code so you can do it as well if you need/want to, so the video is below…

This video is a bit longer than my usual videos at just over 9 minutes, but that’s largely because I’ve tried to cover the whole process to make it nice and easy to replicate.

you can grab a copy of the code needed from my useful free stuff site,  where I’ve alsoo included the link for the webmaster tools page, which is where you can submit a reinclusion request if this has happened to you.

Tags: Blogging