UPDATE: After the Google panda effect only useless links like comment links should be tagged as nofollow. Links pointing to your post pages should be kept dofollow like labels and archives
Google Panda effect is the name most of you might heard. It is a strict Google new algorithm that looks for content farms and link farms and completely stops indexing the publisher. If your blog contains too many irrelevant content or duplicate content or your post quantity is less than 300 words and you have too many tags/category labels on your blog that makes no sense then you can be the next target of Google panda update. Your traffic will drop significantly. If you are receiving 2-3K visitors per day, you will end up with just 400-500 visitors. It really shocked me personally when I surveyed official and un-official blogger templates and amazingly found that all category tags or label tags are dofollow. It is really sad on blogger part but I found the same problem on WordPress blogs as well. Even the tags in wordPress are dofollow but since now many expert SEOs have advised to nofollow the label tags therefore we must not delay any further else the consequences could be huge.
To get an idea of nofollow tags then read these detailed tutorial also:
Nofollow all blogger labels links or Category tags
We will nofollow the labels that appear below your post titles and also the labels appearing in your TAG Cloud.
Lets start correcting things:
-
Go To Blogger > Design > Edit HTML -
Backup your template -
Check the "Expand widget templates" box -
Search for this,
<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'>
5. Replace it with this,
<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag,nofollow'>
You have now successfully protected your links in the post labels from panda effect. Now lets correct the Label Cloud Links also.
UPDATE: This part is optional because this widget is located on the sidebar and not directly in your post body where actual crawling takes place. So even if you skip it there is no issue.
6. Search for this,
<a expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' expr:href='data:label.url'><data:label.name/></a>
7. Replace it with this code,
<a expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' expr:href='data:label.url' rel='nofollow'><data:label.name/></a>
8. Save and you are all set!
How to know if you have done all steps correctly?
Simply highlight a label link or cloud link on your blog and then right click and choose "view selection source". You will find you label links having the rel="nofollow" tag attach to it like this,
and for label cloud it will look like this,
I hope your blogs may grow even more and may stay protected from tech errors. We added the nofollow tags to all MBT label links also and we will be updating you more on this. Please let me know if you needed any further assistance. Peace out! :)
