Just over a year ago Andy Beard almost broke our server with a Twitterstorm regarding our observation of WordPress.com nofollowing their Tag links and thereby removing the high PR advantage it’s authors used to enjoy.

Today it was pointed out to us by an IE user (yes, they do still exist)  that body text links from WordPress.com are now redirected, striking another blow against the Spammers and Sploggers who plague free systems.

Outgoing body text links are now redirected through an intermediary subdomain http://go2.wordpress.com/ thereby removing any linkjuice  / value that WordPress.com bloggers may have thought they were sending.

There’s a forum post about it here saying if you pay for the Ads free version , then this isnt implemented, but we cant see too many “linkwheel” implementations (past or future) paying for their “web2.0″ properties, so this will likely achieve the desired effect against any “SEO users” who still haven’t gotten WordPress’s message, and the rest, well they wont get any ranking benefits for any time spent spamming WP anymore.

We’re also expecting several sites we watch belonging to client competitors to take a rankings hit fairly soon, as these old links get re-cached and disappear off the linkmap.

Latest update

Joe Stepnowski – a director at Skimlinks contacted us directly and informed us how it works and what the aim was. It’s an automatic affiliate linking system that redirects via javascript, and leave the HTML links below intact.

In summary,  WordPress links are still seen live inside Google WMT panels and still pass Pagerank.

We also now have two different clients running Skimlinks and it seems to be a really good product.