I recently noticed WordPress.com hosted blogs started displaying three to four links to “possibly related posts” WordPress has deemed related to their hosted page’s content.
Usually the first link is pointed to somewhere else within the same blog while the balance of the links are then distributed to other blogs which more often than not appear to be other WordPress blogs.
I have been watching my referrals and haven’t noticed hardly any new traffic coming in from other WordPress blogs but I have noticed my search related referrals have dropped by nearly a factor of 10.
My drop in search traffic appears to coincide with the launch of the WordPress “possibly related posts” automatic link generator.
If I were to to guess why my search traffic dried up I would guess it is because my blog posts that had enjoyed near constant search positions have been devalued vis-a-vis the links WordPress has now inserted in all of my pages.
WordPress blog comments automatically receive the “No follow” link attribute so as to not unnecessarily pass site value to spammers so why does WordPress think they can rob all of their bloggers of the value each one has built in their blog by redistributing their sites search value to other blogs – especially other WordPress blogs?
Regardless of whether my search engine traffic dropped because of the addition of the “Possibly Related Posts” links now being generated by WordPress, WordPress.com should add the “No Follow” attribute to their “Possibly Related Posts” link scheme to preserve the continued good will of the bloggers who’s content produces WordPress traffic.
Tags: Blogger, Blogs, NoFollow, Possibly Related Posts, Search Engine Traffic, Wordpress.com
Search Marketing Communications 
August 28, 2010 at 8:36 am |
This is an old post of yours, and since then, WordPress has added nofollow attributes to these links.
However, the quality of links seems to be exceptionally poor. I recently had a post on my blog display three links: one to a parked domain, one to a page not found, and one to a very brief blog post on a blog that had only a single entry.
Can’t wordpress filter these better? The results would be much better if they filtered even for something basic like blogs that had been around for at least 3 months with at least 10 posts…that would prevent all the junk that I have. WordPress is pretty diligent at shutting down spam blogs (unlike blogger) so I think this would result in most of the posts truly being relevant.
February 11, 2011 at 4:34 pm |
I agree. I wish you would post an article on how to disable this! can you, or are we stuck with it? I serached wordpress to try and find out and it is your ‘articles’ that pop to the top…
help.