The NoOldSpamLinks Plugin for WordPress now has a full user interface. Now you can easily:
- Mark old links in your blog “no follow”. I call this “blacklisting a domain.”
- Exclude some categories of pages from applying the blacklist to domains in the domain blacklist.
- Add nofollows to all links in one of your categories.
I think it’s time for me to explain exactly how to use customize the plugin. For those of you who are majorly-experienced with plugins the directions are download NoOldSpamLinks, unzip, upload to your plugin folder, activate then visit “Options=> NoOldSpamLinks” to customize. Read, and all will be “obvious”.
The rest of this explanation is for newbies who have no clue what visit “Options =>NoOldSpamLinks” means!
When you visit the Wordpess admin area, you will always notice “Options” in the blue band across the top. Click that. If you have activated the NoOldSpamLinks plugin, you will now see “NoOldSpamLinks” in the black band below. Click that to load the customization screen. The top of the screen looks like this:
You can now begin to add domains to your “domain blacklist”. To do this, enter the domain name in the first text box outlined in green. Then click “add”. That’s it.
Notice I am entering johnchow.com? He has evidently been banned by Digg, banned by Technorati, and in his words “bitch slapped by Google” for google bombing.You can read more reaction to him at all these places:1,2, 3,
4, 5, 6.
Now that he’s heavily penalized by Google, there is a risk that linking to him will cause Google to consider your blog to live in a “bad neighborhood”. So, if you’ve ever linked JohnChow, you might want to consider adding his domains to the blacklist.
Now, what if you make a typo? Or regret adding someone to the list? Or they mend their ways and become a decent non-spammy blogger?
Scroll to the bottom of the screen. Find the entry you wish to delete and click “delete”. That entry will be taken off the blacklist. Simple!
Oh, notice I entered both johnchow.com and www.johnchow.com? That’s because these are considered different addresses by the plugin (and for what it’s worth, they are considered different by Google too.)
By the way, those links are really in my blacklist. I’m keeping them their in order to avoid having Google lower my page rank for linking to a site they have penalized.
Now, what if you are the person at the Postie board who wanted to blacklist John Chow, but felt you couldn’t because you had participated in a link exchange. Now, you think it would be unethical to “nofollow” that one link but you’d like to nofollow the other 50 links?
Simple, create a category for link exchanges (you can call it whatever you like). After you create that category, it will appear in the pulldown menu marked “1″. Make that category the “whitelist category”. Click “submit exceptions”.
Now, the plugin won’t add nofollows to any links in posts tagged with that category. Put all link exchanges in that category.
Yes, you can maintain your ethics and never yank the “follow” on an actual agreed on link exchange but still nofollow the dozens of other links to any “evil” blogger! (For what it’s worth, blogroll is not a real category for posts. So, if you don’t want to list any category, just pick “blogroll”.)
But the NoSpamLinks plugin does more than just let you delink individuals. Maybe you post sponsored blogs with an agreement to keep links up for some number of days? Maybe you’d like to no follow those after your contractual obligation to maintain the links expires?
That used to be difficult; so advertisers counted on getting more than they paid you for.
Now it’s easy and you can get paid for the value you provide. Create a category for those posts; that category will appear in pull-down menu #2. Select that category, then enter the number of days in box #3. Click “submit exceptions”. Now, whenever you write a post you’d like to nofollow after a set time period, place it in that category. Problem solved!
Now you can fulfill your contractual obligations, and later ask that customer to pay you for continued advertising: That’s capitalism in action!