The links are nofollow because it’s considered “good” practice in these cases from Google’s perspective and it should actually increase the ranking of your pages. Any reason why you want to change that?
Hmm, for Share links this makes sense, but surely doesn’t make sense for Follow links as you want search engines to follow these and make the association?
I have added this line ‘rel’ => $context == ‘share’ ? ‘nofollow’ : null, to synved-social.php . So now on a page like http://www.flickreel.com/david-koepp-writing-indiana-jones-5/ – it’s only the share article links which have nofollow applied and not the follow links in the header…
The reason why it’s best practice to put nofollow is that otherwise you have a bunch of identical links on all your pages and Google considers this bad (too repetitive or “spammy”). At least this is the standard SEO stand on duplicated links.
Honestly I think you might be being too cautious with your approach. They’re unlikely to be considered spammy if they’re pointing to legit accounts which are part of your brand – you’ll want Google, etc. to be more aware of the association if anything. Since removing the nofollow links it would appear that our social media accounts are displaying higher up in Google.
I’m not a SEO expert so I have to be cautious when it comes to the default behavior of the plugin, to avoid potential issues. However, it’s relatively easy for users to make modifications to change that behavior, although I’d recommend you used the synved_social_button_list_markup filter rather than editing the code, this way your code will be upgrade safe.
