I have just recently enabled the Firefox Addon SearchStatus while on my blog’s homepage. I was amazed that the Twitter For WordPress plugin doesn’t add rel=”nofollow” to the My Latest Tweets widget (see on the right in the sidebar).
Therefore I have just added the corresponding code to the plugin’s PHP file and thought I should share this information because it might really be useful for other people.
Adding rel=”nofollow” to the Twitter links
First make a backup of the file wp-content/plugins/twitter-for-wordpress/twitter.php and save it as twitter.org.php in the same directory. Afterwards open the file twitter.php and modify the code as highlighted here. You need to scroll to the right to see the highlighted code:
function hyperlinks($text) {
// match protocol://address/path/file.extension?some=variable&another=asf%
$text = preg_replace("/\s([a-zA-Z]+:\/\/[a-z][a-z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-z]{2,6}[a-zA-Z0-9\/\*\-\?\&\%]*)([\s|\.|\,])/i"," <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"$1\" class=\"twitter-link\">$1</a>$2", $text);
// match www.something.domain/path/file.extension?some=variable&another=asf%
$text = preg_replace("/\s(www\.[a-z][a-z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-z]{2,6}[a-zA-Z0-9\/\*\-\?\&\%]*)([\s|\.|\,])/i"," <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://$1\" class=\"twitter-link\">$1</a>$2", $text);
// match name@address
$text = preg_replace("/\s([a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-zA-Z]*\@[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9\_\.\-]*[a-zA-Z]{2,6})([\s|\.|\,])/i"," <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"mailto://$1\" class=\"twitter-link\">$1</a>$2", $text);
return $text;
}
function twitter_users($text) {
$text = preg_replace('/([\.|\,|\:|\¡|\¿|\>|\{|\(]?)@{1}(\w*)([\.|\,|\:|\!|\?|\>|\}|\)]?)\s/i', "$1<a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http://twitter.com/$2\" class=\"twitter-user\">@$2</a>$3 ", $text);
return $text;
}
After you have added the code save the file, upload it you your server and you’re done.
If you are using the WP Super Cache plugin be sure to empty the cache so that all pages are updated.
