NoOldSpamLinks Plugin
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
June 14 Edited to reflect the way this really works. Tags:
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Comments
17 Responses to “NoOldSpamLinks Plugin”
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Your wish may well be granted, though there seems to be a problem with the URL.
I have the URL right, but the file doesn’t behave the way I most like. You have to cut and paste. (I’ll fix when I get off this endless phone call with the University of Michigan!)
Brilliant idea, thanks for coding it…
(fellow PPPer)
I always thought I should teach myself how to write a plugin. And believe it or not, it was a comment by someone else on the Postie board that made me decide this was the one to write! (I knew it would be really easy. This doesn’t do much.)
I have had a look at the code now…
It would be great if you could somehow add an interface to allow adding and removing domains
Interesting idea. I can see where this plugin could be useful beyond just John Chow.
I have nothing personal against Chow myself. I just can’t support some of his money making schema. I’ve been championing removing nofollow for quite a while. I also know there’s a lot of people who just follow what Chow does. I felt necessary to weigh in on the topic to help educate bloggers why they may not want to take on this specific practice.
Thanks for the link.
Well, I just put you on my ‘Evil-doers I Love the Most’ list. This is absolutely one of the best plugin ideas I have seen in a long time, excluding Dofollow of course!
I am not a WordPress user (yet) and was wondering if this will also Nofollow links in Comments as well?
@Andy:
I know! I plan to make an administrative interface. That just takes longer– and I need to look stuff up. (Not a lot of stuff, but some.)
I’m a mechanical engineer, not a programme, so you see I always need to read to seek out the various commands. But, it will be done.
I’ll also be adding a feature that makes exceptions for certain categories because based on postie board suggested that some people did “official” link exchanges where they got one, and he gave one. But later they gave loads. So, I could let people put things like that in some sort of “link exchange” category (which they can call whatever they wish.) Then, the plugin always grants that exchange, but not others.
I forsee several versions.
@Dawd:
Yes. If it had only been for Chow, I would have called the plugin NoChowLinks!
It’s valuable much more generally. For example: I actually know of an instance where a feminist blogger sold out his domain to a porn site operator. He had tons of backlinks, and some of those who granted backlinks wanted to take them back. My own first domain was slammed in 2000 and for a while was a porn site. I had to do a lot of work to get my links to that domain name out!
So, you can see how valuable this plugin could be. It’s more than Chow.
@Webstractions: Currently, it only no follows in content. I need to read about order dependence to adapt it to comments.
Basically, I would need to get it to always filter after any do follow plugin is called. Because if DoFollow works last, it will just strip the nofollows out!
However, if you want a quick fix and are willing to edit plugins, I describe the very few lines of code required to modify the do_follow plugin to leave no follows in johnchow.com links!
Ooh, great point. I hadn’t thought of that. Though I have to admit a rather late night working on my new blog design (not up yet) so little sleep and I’m a bit groggy this morning.
So thanks for creating this. And sorry that I only commented on Chow. I’ll definitely down and watch the development of this plugin.
Strangely enough, I don’t really have any huge feelings about Chow. I didn’t even know who he was until about a week ago when I read people on forums asking about him. Honestly, I used to blog only knitting.
Still, the idea was triggered by conversations about Chow that occurred in forums. I do know that right now there are bloggers who might want to delink Chow because they think his site has become spammy and lowq uality. That’s why I’m using his site as an example.
But the plugin-idea has much, much broader application. That’s why I like Andy’s idea of making an administrative panel. That’s going to take me a little while though because I think it means I need to
a) write something that creates a new table in the database so I can store the “blacklist” of domains.
b) write the admin panel (that calls a function– to be written– that pulls the domains out of the table.
c) modify the simple plugin to use the domains in the database.
Knowing this, I decided to just release the simple plugin for now, and let modestly brave souls edit the one line.
If you based it around a GPL license, you could actually just take a few existing plugins, such as the nofollow wikipedia plugin, add a loop for recursion through your array, and borrow an interface from one of the other simple plugins.
Thanks Andy. I probably will base it around a GPL license. But I’ll still need to squint at some code to figure out just what the various lines of code do and adapt them. So, I’m guessing the admin interface is a month down the line!
Meanwhile, I figure what I have is at least functional for those who aren’t afraid to modify a few lines of code. (You’ll also soon see I extended to comments now too. That’s easier for me!)
To add to what Any said. Blogger FTP can adapt the scripting from WordPress. I use a PhpBB backend which includes templating, admin functions and authorization.
It would be easy to adapt the WP script into this environment. Looking forward to your advancements in the coding, will be looking at it intently.
Really interesting idea!
Great idea Lucia! I love it. I think I’ll have a few uses for it.
I’ll be keeping an eye on this plugin as well and once I try it out I’ll make a post about it too. Get you some of the linky love that this site deserves since you do have a lot of well thought out posts here.