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Fixing The Nofollow Bug in Blogspot
Nathania like many others I have been finding have the nofollow tag enabled sitewide in their blogspot templates which says to Google, “Do not follow any links on my blog”, so you can imagine what this bug does to their rankings.
Looks like Nathania fixed it with a little help from her new friends:
Ok, was able to fix the nofollow links for both the SEM Zone and my little blog about classic films. They both use Blogspot templates. However, they use different templates.
For the SEM Zone, I followed the advice given above by JLH.
1. I saved a copy of the template HTML code in case all you-know-what broke loose.
2. I went to the SEM Zone home page and pulled the source code.
3. I copied the Meta tags stuff - ending with the line that had the noindex and nofollow tags.
4. I went back to the template and erased this:
5. I replaced it with the meta tags i copied from the source code EXCEPT without the noindex nofollow tags.
Tada!
NOW - some of you may have this problem, but you’ll have to do something else altogether b/c you’re looking at a different template.
1. Look at the HTML code for your template inside blogger.
2. Make sure you click the box for “Expand Widget Templates” at the top right hand corner above the box containing the code.
3. Either copy and paste the code into a word processing or text program to search for nofollow (and then delete and paste the remaining code back into blogger) OR just look carefully for the nofollow tag and delete it.
BTW - no matter which method you have to use - make sure you SAVE your changes. And republish your blog.
Similar Post:
February 19th, 2007 at 10:09 am
I posted a link to your site and this page in the blogger help group, I hope you don’t mind.
February 19th, 2007 at 10:16 am
And I linked you within this post like the best of SEO elites. ;)
Thank you!
February 19th, 2007 at 10:29 am
I’ve kindly told many bloggers in my niche(s) about the problem, which to be honest they wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.
February 19th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Since it’s a recent problem I don’t think the average blogger knows about it yet, unless you browse with a nofollow highlight extension nobody will notice it.
Since this bug adds the nofollow,noindex tag to the top of the page, we are going to see a rash of blogger users in the future complaining that their site went supplemental. Since google bases its crawl rate on the actual PR of the page the index page more than likely is crawled most often. It will see the NOFOLLOW and then drop all the links from the home page to the deeper pages. If they don’t have any external links to them they’ll likely go supplemental, and not get crawled for a while. Googlebot won’t see those page’s NOINDEX tag and thus leave them in the index as supplemental.
So the pattern I expect to see is that their home page and most popular pages will be dropped from the index due to the NOINDEX tag, and the remaining pages will be supplemental with stale cache dates.
The sad thing is that most bloggers probably don’t check their site: status, don’t have access to server logs, and will just think they aren’t popular anymore. The only indicator they may see will be the green pixels in their toolbar which will stay the same for their homepage but will probably disappear for their internal pages unless linked to externally.
This is a great example of the domino or butterfly effect in action. Four months from now when the novice bloggers notice their PR drop on their deep pages, they’ll all be screaming “What happened”, when it could all be traced back to a rouge META tag automatically installed in February.
Hold on…it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
This is also a good example of being ahead of the curve, if you continue to blog about this, by the time the blogger folks are searching for a solution, you should be well established in the organic results.
February 19th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Not my intent but you are correct John, also make it a point to be more in your face with issues you feel need immediate response.
February 25th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I was going through the steps you’ve provided to remove the noindex/nofollow tags on my blog at Blogger, but your Step 4 is missing the information after the colon. What did you erase from the template?
May 27th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Item #4 above says
“4. I went back to the template and erased this: ”
But there’s nothing after the colon. What did you erase?
Also, you say “I followed the advice given above by JLH” with a link to “JLH”, but the link doesn’t lead to the advice, it just leads to JLH’s home page, where there is no sign of the advice you refer to or in fact any sign of anything related to the topic of noindex/nofollow tags on Blogger.
May 27th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Oh, never mind. I just noticed that someone else asked the same question 3 months ago and you didn’t fix it or reply to her, so I guess that means I’m out of luck as well.
May 27th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Why don’t you ask JLH: http://www.jlh-design.com/contact/
I could not find the original post on his blog.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
I wonder if Google algorithm will start penalizing Websites because all external links use rel=”nofollow”
It sort of makes me think that one is trying to manipulate Google PR algorithm with no onrganic outbound links.
Definitely against Google Quality Gidelines.
Well the PR hoarding bunch has to learn the hard way.
GWHF–>