Most website have links to external websites and many with links to bookmarking/sharing websites. With both of these, icons are often used to represent a link to an external site and the websites themselves. With Drupal marking external links and bookmarking sites can be achieved by using the External Links and Service Links modules respectively. The configuration page offers simple and easy to follow options.
WordPress, unlike Drupal, has a host off plug-ins that can do the same thing. Having more options can be a good thing, but can also be a bad thing. The two plug-ins used on this site to achieve external links and bookmarking are Hunk External Links plugin and the Sociable plugin respectively. Unlike Drupal, there are few configuration options and out of the box the bookmark icons will also show the external link icons.
A simple alteration to the Sociable plugin can remove this. Open up sociable.php and change line 644 from:
$link .= “<a ” rel=\”nofollow\”";
to
$link .= “<a class=\”noicon\” rel=\”nofollow\”";
A simple hack that works.