These days Google has been penalizing (by decreasing the pagerank) sites for placing links to other sites with rel="nofollow" tags. The step taken by Google is for flagging those sites for a main reason that they are playing with the Google search ranking algorithm and Google wants its algorithm to be as full proof as possible.
Blogroll in WordPress displays a list of blogger’s favorite blogs in the sidebar of their blog home page. Now Word press BlogRoll does not have the option of adding the rel="nofollow" tags for sites in the Blogroll but has lots of other option for XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and for my blog the case was that I link to lots of my friends blog and nothing related to link exchange or selling links.
I wanted to add the rel="nofollow" tag but not for all the links because I would also like to have the XFN option open.
So here is how you should be doing that.
We need to hack through WordPress core source code file. Go to wp-includes/ directory of your blog root folder, then edit the bookmark-template.php file
Find
Replace with
You need to do that at two places. One in
Blogroll in WordPress displays a list of blogger’s favorite blogs in the sidebar of their blog home page. Now Word press BlogRoll does not have the option of adding the rel="nofollow" tags for sites in the Blogroll but has lots of other option for XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and for my blog the case was that I link to lots of my friends blog and nothing related to link exchange or selling links.
I wanted to add the rel="nofollow" tag but not for all the links because I would also like to have the XFN option open.
So here is how you should be doing that.
We need to hack through WordPress core source code file. Go to wp-includes/ directory of your blog root folder, then edit the bookmark-template.php file
Find
PHP Code:
if ( '' != $rel )
$rel = ' rel="' . $rel . '"';
PHP Code:
if ( '' != $rel )
$rel = ' rel="' . $rel . '"';
else
$rel = ' rel="nofollow"';
_walk_bookmarks function and other in get_links functions.




even with rel="nofollow" tags, whereas these links are useful for people and make things easy for search engine spiders as they are as a simple text for them.