PatchLog
Follow Self Pings
The Problem
Wordpres creates all links to comment author's site or pingbacks/trackbacks with "nofollow external" . This includes links to your own blog. Apparently this is bad for your pagerank according to this post:Pinging Your Own Blog Posts? Good or Bad?
The Solution
On that article mentioned above, the author suggested that you can use a plugin that would make wordpress stop creating pingback links to your own blog. I didn't like that idea so here's mine: a plugin that will make wordpres NOT add "external nofollow" to the pings to your own blog.
The plugin doesn't require any configuration, just download, install , activate and forget about it.
Download
UPDATE: The plugin is now hosted in wordpress plugins directory. That means you can install it dirrectly from your wordpress admin or go to it's page to download it: Follow Self Pings Plugin
The first version of the plugin had a small but that prevented it from working on blogs that were installed in one director and had the home page pointing to something else. This bug is fixed in version 0.2 . You should be able to update it from the plugin admin.
Comments
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I don’t know if I believe that having nofollow links to your blog like pingbacks can hurt your rankings. As far back as I can think, google has never penalized anybody for links to their site, regardless of the attribute. Do you have any links regarding that? (Nice plugin, by the way)
it’s not that having links back to your blog is the problem. The problem is that the page rank that is passed from a page to the other
is divided between all links on a page but only those who don’t have nofollow get the page rank. Thus the links back to your blog in the pingbacks
will not transfer any page rank even if page rank is lost on them. This is why it is better to follow them then to nofollow.
Matt Cuts explains better how the page rank mechanism works in this article: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
The rationale for this plugin is sound but when I activated it it didn’t seem to dofollow existing self trackbacks. What it did do was to put a feed from this blog onto my dashboard.
The plugin does put a feed of this blog on your dashboard. you can disable the feed easily by clicking the “Screen options” button at the top of your dashboard, but the plugin should also remove the “nofollow” attribute from your self pings ( remember these are only the trackbacks that have the same domain as your blog ) . If you can give me an example where it didn’t work and more details about your blog ( version, pluggins installed ) I will gladly look into it to make it work.
Thanks, it would be good to get it working so I’ve activated your plugin again.
example:
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/06/09/image-editing-seashore-layers
trackbacks 2 and 4 are from the same domain
Wordpress 2.8.4
I’ll send you a list of plugins in use when I can find an email to send it too.
You can send the list by using the contact form
The bug was because you had wordpress installed in a subdirectory. This is fixed now. You ca upgrade the plugin through plugin admin or go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/follow-self-pings to download and reinstall.
Plugin upgraded and working properly now. Well done and thanks.
I plan to install the plugin shortly. However, I’d recommend you disclose the dashboard changes in the description. If you leave it an unannounced surprise, you’re like to attract a fair amount of criticism (e.g., spam) whereas an upfront disclosure can mitigate that. Two cents for your consideration.
There are no actual dashboard changes. The plugin just adds a widget to the dashboard with RSS feeds from my blog. The widget is easy to disable by editing screen options. I’m not the only one doing this. Actually I got the idea and original code from Joost de Valk – http://yoast.com/ ( it’s gpl and he uses it in all of his plugins. )
It’s a small way of self promotion that shouldn’t really bother anyone.
if i understand this plugin right, this creates a do-follow attribute to all internal links but not to external ones. am i correct?
Not ALL internal links, just internal pingbacks and trackbacks
but no-follow still applies for external links right?
yeah, that’s why it’s called follow-self-pings