Making external link nofollow is good practice for SEO. We have recently checked how you can add nofollow attributes to specific WordPress category.Adding Nofollow links to affiliate links, paid links, comments links or blogroll links or any other non-informative links is useful for SEO. It would be recommended to make such links nofollow by an SEO experts and its basic SEO tips for everyone. If you are not coding master, you can manually Nofollow External Links to your outgoing links from your articles.
Why using nofollow for outbound external links:
Generally, using no follow attributes to any hyperlinks from our article informs the Google which hyperlinks you are recommend to add value and, search engine will understand, which hyperlinks they should give value to. When used effectively, nofollowing certain hyperlinks allows to keep your PageRank for inner hyperlinks.
Q: Does this mean “PageRank sculpting” (trying to change how PageRank flows within your site using e.g. nofollow) is a bad idea?
A: I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.
There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn’t recommend PageRank sculpting.
Will Google penalize sites which only link using the nofollow attribute?
How to Automatically add Nofollow to External Links
Suppose your blog has 100 post, and all post has some external links, you will become mad by editing all one by one . If you have more than 1000 posts on your blog, it would be quite difficult for you to add them one by one. Ehowportal has found best WordPress SEO plugin to make all external links nofollow. WP External Links (nofollow new window seo) is the recommended plugin that would make your external links nofollow and you can open external links in a new window with default setting of that WP Plugins.
WP External Links – WordPress Plugin to make External Links Nofollow
Once you install this SEO Plugins for WordPress on your WordPress dashboard, you can check it’s setting from External Links option available on sidebar of your WordPress dashboard. It includes General setting, SEO setting, style setting, extra setting and admin setting.
General setting includes setting for external links. You can choose option according to your requirement. Say, you want to open external link in same window, new window/tab, topmost frame or seperate window or tab.Another option is really helpful. You can apply that setting to all contents for your entire site. If you want to make only post contents or comment section as nofollow, you can also do that with that option.
WP External Links WordPress Setting
Ignore link URL containing, is the setting you want to exclude considering that URL as external. So if you add yahoo.com or Google.com URL there, it will be ignored for making WordPress nofollow links. Wherever in your article , those URL appear it will be marked as dofollow. Another point is about SEO setting, that is important in point of Search Engine Optimization. this will add rel-nofollow and rell-external tag to your external link. You can set link title from that option.
Related : How to Find if Link is Nofollow or Dofollow
WP External Links WordPress Plugin Style Setting
On style setting, you can show how your external link would be styled on your article. Suppose you want to make little icon beside external link like Wikipedia, you can choose icon from those icon set. There is extra setting to replace javascript code for your external links.
Conclusion
When you Add nofollow to a Link and rel-external attribute is important point in terms of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress. If you don’t have applied that to your blog, you should do it for proper SEO for your blog.