Useful plugin – but not SEO friendly

  • Hi,

    I was reading the posts to find out if anything had been mentioned about adding “nofollow” tags to the links, and I came across this discussion:

    https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/wp-gallery-custom-links

    There are a number of solution posted there, but in particular, there is a jQuery solution involving injecting the rel=nofollow tag to the link.

    This of course works, in that it inserts the tag, but it is also useless from an SEO perspective.

    The purpose of this tag is to indicate you do not wish to be seen as being a link farm, or that the links are spammy.

    Search Engines do not execute scripts when they are simply crawling for links. The parse the links as they are written in the html.

    That means, when a spider crawls the site, it does not see the rel=nofollow tag, because it doesn’t exist until the page is actually loaded.

    This is actually a big thing!

    In fact it is huge. A simple example might be for a social club, or a charity, who display galleries of images for things such as Sponsors.

    Where there are many links of this nature that are followed, it can damage the company/club/charity who these sponsors are trying to support, which puts everyone in a difficult position.

    So I guess we can hack the plugin files to hardcode the tag in, but this is not a good idea.

    I like your plugin, and if it gets updated with some other useful functionality, or to fix some bug in the future, my hack gets lost.

    Would it not be possible for you to add a checkbox toggle in the settings to turn on/off rel=nofollow?

    That would be lovely, and for anyone who is serious about SEO, it would be really lovely!

    In the meantime I guess I need to write some custom php to alter the links, and hardcode in the tags before the links are actually generated from the database.

    Thanks

    Guy

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-gallery-custom-links/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Hi,

    It seems like there are no problem to add filter of output or add checkbox/dropdown.
    But I don’t see GitHub or similar so I could do pull request.

    Came here from the same reason – just working locally on SEO and realized that two partnership pages with ~40 external URL aren’t good…

    Looking for author response.

    Greetings

    At the moment found working author’s solution in Add 2 more fields? thread.

    add_filter( 'wpgcl_filter_raw_gallery_link_url', 'my_gallery_link_url_filter', 10, 3 );
function my_gallery_link_url_filter( $link, $attachment_id, $post_id ) { return $link . '" rel="nofollow'; }

    Seems reasonably, should be added to FAQ section and I think it’s enought.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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