A short time ago nearly every blogger I know suffered a substantial Google PageRank drop. Some of them were at PR5 and dropped to PR2, PR1 and even down to zero. This of course was speculated to be due to paid links or at least what appeared to be paid links within the posts on their blogs. Some bloggers went as far as going through every old post on their blogs to remove links from posts, even if they werent paid or “sponsored” links. That’s when I thought a little plugin to do this automatically might be kind of handy to have. I searched and could not find any plugin to do exactly what I needed. So, I put one together. Paid blogging has become very popular in the last year or so and I figured alot of people might benefit from using this plugin. This plugin was developed mainly for use by all of you paid bloggers, but others may find it useful as well.

What does the “Old Post Links” plugin do, exactly?

In a nutshell, the plugin allows you to specify a category and choose the ammount of days in which you would like the posts from that category to be considered “old posts”. The plugin can either add a rel=”nofollow” tag to all external links (links pointing to other websites) from the posts in that category, or it can completely disable those links so that your readers and search engines no longer see them while keeping the keyword or anchor text (no longer hyperlinked) still in place.

Still not quite sure what the benefits of using this plugin would be? Well, Google doesn’t seem to like websites to have a ton of external links. If youre into paid blogging (which seems to be popular these days), your external links can really pile up. Even if you’re not into paid blogging, after you’ve blogged for so long, you are bound to have quite a bit of external links from talking about various products or websites. This plugin just helps keep your external links to a minimum.

Information Added: This plugin also works with the TLA InLinks plugin. All you have to do is change one line to your TLA InLinks plugin and all of your TLA links will be immune to the Old Post Links plugin. If you are using the standard TLA plugin that just adds links to your sidebar and such, you do not have to change anything. Those links will not be effected by this plugin. This plugin only effects links within posts. Download the plugin and check out README.txt for more info.

Download it here: Old Post Links v1.0 Old Post Links v1.1

You can also visit my Wordpress Plugins page for this plugin and others.

*December 7, 2007 - This plugin has been updated to use 1 category, 5 categories or ALL categories.

*December 10,2007 - I’ve been asked multiple times if this plugin violates Google’s TOS. This doesn’t in any way violate Google’s rules. What the search engines see is the exact same thing as what your readers see. This is no different than going in and manually changing or removing the links. The plugin just saves you time by doing it automatically.