Official WordPress Documentation Prohibits Links to Commercial Blogs

What do you think about taking commercial blog links from any official documentation? Natural links that are given based on the content are fine where you get credits from some other site. But you are not supposed to buy links and if you buy links, results in a manual penalty on the site. Anyhow, the WordPress team has made some action against this by placing a ban on including commercial links inside their official documentation.

As a part of the new external linking policy, the WordPress team banned commercial links inside the documentation. This policy is also applicable for those commercial blogs that do not sell any products. Even if your content is informative but is also commercial, then it is banned. This policy is to stop placing links to informative and helpful content that are on the blogs of any commercial site.

What a Commercial site is?

A website that has any kind of cash flow that is not under any non-profit organization filed within the state. If you are selling a service, product, or advertisement, then it is a commercial site. Many web development companies concentrate on commercial sites and provide selling and buying options.

The sites like SEMRush, Ahrefs with great SEO blogs sell their products and post links in helpful blogs but this will also be banned according to the new policy. Posting this kind of link will harm a genuine site that has informative content and in return gain traffic for the value provided.

The point of documentation is, it is the source where the users can find answers and it is the goal of official documentation. External links in official documentation lead the users to another site which is not fair enough to continue and time has arrived to stop this.

Whereas WordPress allows links to stack exchange as the links to stack exchange are not something that is added to the WordPress documentation by the workers at stack exchange. Here the links to stack exchange are requirements and are not supposed to abuse the opportunity of getting their link posted on wp.org. Hence this shows that the WordPress team has come up with this new policy just to stop the abuse of external links and is not really thinking to make documentation so useful with no external links.

If the WordPress team is actually coming up with the point that the documentation should be informative and external links are not necessary, then they wouldn’t have allowed external links to the stack exchange.

Also, many web wordpress development company has come against this policy as they are saying many companies that contribute to WordPress are used to get some promotions as a benefit in return through the links but now by removing the links, the WordPress team is treating these companies as those that don’t give back anything.

In the WordPress manual, all the links are nofollowed and will not pass PageRank but the one from Developer.WordPress.org domain, it does not use the Nofollow attribute. So the links from the Developer.WordPress.org domain helps to pass PageRank and also the external links from the same domain pass PageRank.

This new external linking policy has become controversial as they have made exceptions for stack overflow and stack exchange. These sites are ad-supported commercial websites that point that the new policy is arbitrary. It will be much easier to convince the people if the WordPress team had also banned the external links to both stack exchange and stack overflow.

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