Do you want to add Nofollow to all external links in WordPress? If yes, you need this guide on how to add Nofollow to all external links.
What is Nofollow Link
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A nofollow link is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank. This happen when the person doing the linking plays with the HTML to intentionally tell Google not to make the link relevant for your website. You can read our guide on how to get quality backlinks to your websites.
Why and When You Need to Nofollow All External Links on your Website
Webmasters have a practice of ‘nofollowing’ all external links present in their site (especially the links to a competing site), save a few. Whether nofollowing a link is good for SEO or bad is a whole different and largely debatable issue altogether.
Link juice is kind of your SEO score card. If you are linking to more sites than the sites linking back to you, then you will start losing authority and that is why most webmaster uses no follow attribute on their websites.
Example of Nofollow attribute;
<a href="https://wpressbeginner.com" rel="nofollow">blue text</a>
Example of Dofollow attribute;
<a href="https://wpressbeginner.com">blue text</a>
So you now see the difference between Nofollow and Dofollow attribute. By default, WordPress does not allow you to automatically add nofollow to external links. You will have to manually add this to outgoing links to external sites.
Ways to add Nofollow attribute to external links
There are different ways to add Nofollow attribute to external links either with plugins or manual placement.
Add Nofollow attribute to external link using plugins
We all know that on WordPress their is one open way, it is using plugins, so we will explain how you can use two different plugins to add Nofollow attribute to external link.
Add Nofollow attribute to external link using Title and No follow for Links Plugin
An easier way is to use Title and NoFollow For Links plugin, you can read our guide on how to install plugins on your WordPress site. It adds a title field and a nofollow checkbox in the insert link popup. You can make links nofollow as you add them.
Simply edit or create a new WordPress post and then click on the insert link button in the post editor. The insert link popup will appear, and you will notice the restored Title field and a checkbox to add the nofollow attribute to the link.
The HTML of your hyperlink with a title and nofollow attributes will look like this:
<a href="https://wpressbeginner.com" title="Example Domain" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Example Website</a>

But if you run a multi-author site, then it increases the chances that your authors may forget to check the box for some external links. In this case, you need a solution that does not require any user input.
Add Nofollow attribute to external link using rel Nofollow plugin
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Rel Nofollow plugin. Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » External Links page to configure the plugin settings.
The first option in the plugin settings applies nofollow globally. You can keep it unchecked if only you have access to your theme files.
Scroll down a little and enable ‘Add Nofollow’ by clicking the checkbox next to it. This option will add nofollow to all external links in WordPress posts and pages.
When a post is saved, the plugin adds the rel=”nofollow” attributes to post external links. The plugin also provides an apt checkbox to exclude a post from plugin’s action.
Links which already have a rel attribute are just ignored, so you can set some dofollows are well.
By default, the plugin will only act on posts, no pages or other custom post types.
Please note that the plugin adds these attributes on the fly. Deactivating the plugin will remove nofollow from all links.
That’s all, we hope this article helped you NoFollow all external links in WordPressYou can use our comment session or join our delegate on Facebook to solve any issues related to WordPress and subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials.