How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles
It turns out there is a way for bloggers using Wordpress to "nofollow" links in a way that is (as far as I can tell) totally invisible to advertisers and visible only to the Googlebot. Advertisers should make themselves aware of this and learn to monitor whether or not the links the pay for actually pass link juice.
- How to create undetectable cloaked nofollows in Wordpress .
- Why it is almost always a bad idea to do this.
How to cloak nofollows so only the Googlebot sees them.
Use this two step method:- Prevent anyone other than Google from loading your site using the Google user agent. The purpose of this step will be to prevent detection. This can be done using BadBehavior or Noobliminal's script to verify spiders.
- Insert a few lines PHP code at the top of your Header.php code. This code a) detects the Google user agent, b) checks if this is the page you want to cloak and c) if both occur, it adds the new Robots Exclusion tag. Here's the code to cloack-nofollow my 'page 3' in a Wordpress blog. $user_agent = $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]; if(preg_match("/(google|mediapartners)/i",$userAgent) && is_single('3')){ header("X-Robots-Tag: nofollow"); }
Cloaked nofollows using "X-Robots-Tag: nofollow" is a bad idea.
Now that I've explained how to cloak the nofollows so only Google can see them, let me give a few reasons why it's a verybad idea:- It's unethical: There are legitimate reasons to nofollow links. However, only reasons I can think of to cloak a nofollow tag are either to deceive advertisers who pay you are to gip people you promised link exchanges. If want to "nofollow" every link on page 3 without cloaking, delete this bit in the if statement: "preg_match("/(google|mediapartners)/i",$userAgent) &&". That will nofollow the link for everyone. But if you are a bit evil, you're still tempted, right?
- You will probably make your blog drop out of the SERPS! Why? Well, when you nofollow this way, you no follow every link on a page. This means you will nofollow links you want followed. If you nofollow only one page, this probably isn't an issue. But suppose you begin trying to get clever and nofollow your whole sponsored category? Or every page that contains at least one paid link? Yes, you'll avoid any Google penalty for paid links. But Google will stop following your internal links. Then, unless you are very, very careful, and very very clever, you will soon find your blog dropping out of SERPS for everything. So, massive nofollowing using the "X-Robots-Tag: nofollow" will probably hurt you more than anyone else!
- Cloaking violates Google's guidelines. Now, this might seem like an odd reason. After all, the reason one might wish to nofollow is to obey the guideline of "nofollowing" all paid links. But you don't need to cloak to obey that, right? You can do nofollow publically-- letting everyone including advertisers know what's up. But, if you try to conceal this from the advertisers by cloaking, you violate a second Google guideline. Only Google can catch you, and we don't know what they would do. But, given the negative impact that will come from nofollowing all your internal links, why risk getting an additional penalty for cloaking?
That's how you cloak nofollows... and why you shouldn't!
So, now you know how to cloak a nofollow directive so only Google can see it. But you also know that method nofollows every link on the page and so can screw up Google's ability to crawl your blog. This means if you do it wantonly, you will hurt yourself more than you could ever hurt any advertiser or the person who gave you a reciprocal link hoping for one in return.Tags:blogging cloaked nofollow cloaking google nofollow
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Related Posts:
- Six Reasons I Won't Cloaks Nofollows so Only Google Sees Them.
- Here Are Two Quick Ways to Catch Cloaked Nofollows
- Useless Link Detector: Is it useful?
- Posties Paid $100 to Remove Links
Comments
10 Responses to “How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles”
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Serving content based on client type is a bad idea at the best of times. IT makes the server do far more work than it needs to and 90% of the time is a sign of bad design or cheating. It is not something that I’d want to do.
BTW: the link to the other post is missing the h from http
Speaking of making the server do extra work…. I need to go check what happens if you use WP-Cache. Caching will screw up inexperienced cheaters if you try to IP or client type masking inside the body tags– and I haven’t check inside the meta tags. I bet it will it all up if you do it with X-Robots too. (I have this set up on my no-traffic test blog and noobliminal linked to a nice page to check your tags.)
Well… this cloaking doesn’t get screwed up by WP-cache. Processing 1 “if” is probably not going to overburden the server tooooo much, so that’s likely not a huge concern. But I (other than testing at my test blog) I can’t see any legitimate use of cloaking nofollows!
The nofollow drop from SERPs is somehow deceptive. Google says (something like): we do not pass linkjuice on nofollow links but we do crawl pages as part of our autodiscovery mechanism.
Regards.
At a minimum, if you nofollow your internal link, you won’t pass link juice. There are an awful lot of people who have tested and belie ve Google’s crawler just stops at the “nofollow”. Viperchill wrote about SEO’s confirming that Google doesn’t crawl after hitting a nofollow in February. (Google says it doesn’t crawl aftr hitting a nofollow.)
Do not believe everything Lucia… There are entire campaigns to disinform and scare people into not using nofollow. So much linkjuice wasted over it …
I’ve used it and the nofollow-ed page was indexed (supplemental as it had no links and then site got banned as it was shady-hat). I always block from robots.txt also.
Do not believe all the Gurus out there.
Ok… Well, I guess then people can decide to try or not. I always like to experiment. So now I’m going to have to create a page on my zero traffic rank site, and give it a nofollow link. We’ll see what happens in a few months.
Lucia … discard the previous comment. It’s herbal spam!
Not even spammers would comment on my blog:) I have a new post you might be interested in.
It’s on Sphinn too.
Take care.
[…] it happens, I thought about this strategy way back when I wrote How To Cloak Nofollows on Individual WordPress Articles. Sebastian’s article discussed the “pro” side of this cloaking nofollows on paid […]