Today brings a flood of announcements that Google has knocked down many blog Page Ranks. This is thought to be due to a number of factors including excess numbers of paid posts. So, it is natural that I should hurry up and update “No Old Spam Links”, the plugin that lets you automatically “nofollow” sponsored posts after your contractual obligation to “follow” has expired.
In principle, this plugin may help protect your PR. In practice? Matt Cutts’ has never commented on “No Old Spam Links” and is likely unaware of it. So, who knows?
That said, here are the recent changes to the plugin:
- I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes when widgets were used. I fixed the bug.
- I discovered and fixed a bug that sometimes occurs when you have no specific people in your “nofollow” list. Unfortunately, this bug was affecting my knitting blog so I was giving out way more followed paid links than I intended! Way more.)(Yes, my knitting blog’s page rank dropped; I’ll elaborate on this in a separate post.)
- I tested the new version with WP 2.3. It works fine.
So, if your worried about excess followed paid links, I suggest you install No Old Spam Links. If you aren’t worried about Google, or you are waiting for them to announce the plugin helps, then don’t use it. 
Other plugin news:
- Tricia is testing the new version of Kontera Control at her WP 2.2 blog. I’m testing at my test blog. She was the one who alerted me to the general issue of plugins going buggy when widgets are used.
- I updated “Hide No Sponsored Categories” but I’m letting it sit a few days so I can do a better job detecting any bugs. The future version should work for WP 2.3, be compatible with widgets (in fact, it is widgetized) and hopefully work for all versions of WP 2.2 and above. I also coded to detect problems with early version of WP and inform the user why the options page doesn’t display. (This was, btw, the update from hell because my favorite WP category hook vanished!)
