Another Wordpress Blog

Have you ever wished you could easily switch a whole bunch of old links in your blog to “nofollow”? For whatever reason? Because you discovered a blogger you’d frequently linked was a Republican. Or Democrat? Or maybe you used to link JohnChow but are upset to learn he is now charging visitors for links at his site?

So, you figured, “Charge me for links? I’ve been giving him free links! It’s my freely given links that gives him his PR=6! If he’s charging people, I want to take them all back!”

Hey, if you were a bit put out by Chow’s action, you are in good company!^{(1, 2, 3, 4 5, 6 and 7)}

Unfortunately, you may also have thought it was too much of a hassle to go back through your old blog articles and find all the links to that hungry capitalist blogger (or the Democrat or Republican!) So, you did nothing.

Well, no more!

Today, after a few conversations at forums, I was inspired to write first plugin. I call it “NoOldSpamLinks”; it’s for WordPress blogs. No, it’s not thoroughly tested. I finished it, and tested it at my blog. It works at my blog. It doesn’t do anything very fancy, so presumably it will work at yours.

(Would you like proof that the plugin works? Visit my first post. It’s more than 10 days old; you’ll see the ‘nofollows’. )

If you install NoOldSpamLinks in your plugin folder and activate it, it will change all links to JohnChow’s blog that are older than 10 days to ‘nofollow’.

I bet you are wondering why 10 days? Well, that’s my evil scheme!

By giving follows for a brief time, you can be sure that the your blog will be listed as linking to those domains on services like Technorati because they won’t be able to tell the difference between your link and other links. That will ensure a person who is looking for reactions to the blog post you link can find your post. But, if you prefer a different period of time, you can change that.

Don’t have anything against John Chow, but know another site you’d like to delink? You may also edit the domain names on your blacklist. Add or subtract, but do make sure there is at least 1 domain in the list. Otherwise, deactivate the plugin.

1. Get the plugin by clicking NoOldSpamLinks. The page should open: Copy the code and paste it into a text editor. Name it NoOldSpamLinks.php. Save.
2. If you wish to customize, find the number of days, and change it from 10 to the time you prefer. Find the list of domains, delete or add as you wish. Save the edited file.
3. Upload to your plugins directory and activate. You can check and see that all old links pointing to your list of domain names are now set to ‘nofollow’.

You know… it’s too bad this is a new blog with only 10 visits a day. I’d love zillions to learn of this, install it and see how fast a PR6 can fall!

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June 14 Edited to reflect the way this really works.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Blog Hacks, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.