No Follow Link Error - Support

Resolved Collectibles And More In-Store
2 years, 5 months ago

Rank Math free

Hello. I was adding new products to my store today (i.e. https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/shop/learning-plush-with-velcro-parts/) using Classic Editor as usual. Just before publishing it, I noticed that the SEO Score was a disappointing orange “79”. Eager for a higher green score, I quickly saved it as a draft and set out to improve my website based on the plugin’s recommendations.

In the “Additional” tab, it stated that the product page has a low score because “We found 1 outbound links in your content and all of them are nofollow”. However, after careful review, I realized that I did not make a mistake. On the contrary, my external links were NOT marked “nofollow”. Hence it is a plugin error.

I searched Rank Math’s Knowledge Base and its support tickets and found an entry from a while back that suggested this issue only exists if “Nofollow External Links” is enabled in General Settings. When I first set up Rank Math, I had disabled this field. Oddly, it was now enabled. Accordingly, I toggled the switch back to disabled and hit “Save Changes”.

Sad to say, I was suddenly in limbo on a completely blank white screen (on this url: https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/wp-admin/admin-post.php). Refreshing the page did nothing so I used the “back” button to return to the Link General Settings where I noticed that the change to disabled did not save. It took repeating the process 2 or 3 times (disable, save, blank screen, back, enable) for the “nofollow for External Links” field to finally save as disabled.

Unfortunately, changing that setting to disabled did not change my SEO Score. Even after emptying my website cache, server cache, and browser cache… my seo score was still set at 79. Also, I changed the link settings on the page several times pressing “Update” after each revision but there was still no change in the score.

Frustrated, I decided to forget about it temporarily and focus on updating my Shop page (https://collectiblesandmoreinstore.com/shop). Sadly, the same “nofollow” issue also occurred on my Shop page causing the SEO score to drop from 83 to 76.

Please tell me how I can resolve this matter. I look for to your receiving your response

Thank you and kind regards.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

Reinelle
2 years, 5 months ago

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.

Please check if your website has the ModSec (ModSecurity) feature enabled in your server as it can block the saving module from Rank Math. You can get in touch with your web host for assistance with this process.

If so, you can disable that and check if the issue still persists on your site. If it does, this suggests that the rules that have been set are blocking the requests from our plugin.

I hope that helps.

Thank you.

Collectibles And More In-Store
2 years, 4 months ago

Rank Math free

The issue is not resolved. I added this snippet to my child theme functions.php file which allowed me to disable “Nofollow External Links” in Rank Math’s General Settings However my Rank Math SEO Score is still low because it still says “We found 2 outbound links in your content and all of them are nofollow” WHICH IS NOT TRUE.

add_filter( ‘rank_math/settings/general’, function( $tabs) {
unset( $tabs[‘htaccess’] );
return $tabs;
});

Jaideep Asrani
2 years, 4 months ago

Hello,

We might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

We really look forward to helping you.

Collectibles And More In-Store
2 years, 4 months ago

Rank Math free

Hello,

I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?

Thank you.

Collectibles And More In-Store
2 years, 4 months ago

Rank Math free

Hello,

I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?

Thank you.

Jaideep Asrani
2 years, 4 months ago

Hello,

I was able to check that the Nofollow External Links option was enabled on your site:

I have disabled the option and your product is passing the dofollow external links test:

Please check and let us know if you need any other assistance.

Collectibles And More In-Store
2 years, 4 months ago

Rank Math free

This problem seems to be fixed but isn’t it better to have External links “nofollow”?
Jeremy
2 years, 4 months ago
Hello,

Although it will depend on how would you like the Search Engine to crawl the links in your content. Rank Math recommends having at least 1 external link with a dofollow in it and you don’t have to follow this one if adding dofollow doesn’t apply to you.

These tests are just guidelines and one does not need to follow them religiously.

With that said, you can disable this test by adding this filter into your theme’s functions.php file:
```
/**
 * Filter to disable External Dofollow Link test
 */
add_filter('rank_math/researches/tests', function ($tests, $type) {
	unset($tests['linksNotAllExternals']);
	return $tests;
}, 10, 2 );
```
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
RankBot
2 years, 3 months ago

Hello,

Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.

If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.

Thank you.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

The ticket ‘No Follow Link Error’ is closed to new replies.