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Nofollow? Yes, fix! Bring some link love to your commenters
WordPress may be blocking your thoughts from the world.
The blogging software automatically inserts a rel=”nofollow” after hyperlinks in the comment section of its blogs. Google, Yahoo and other search engines do not follow links tagged this way. But what if you are legitimately including URLs in comments on WP blogs? Don’t your brilliant comments/links that contribute to the value of the Web deserve a little link love from search engines?
You can’t do much for the comments you submit on other sites, but you can help out your fellow bloggers by:
- Manually editing the “nofollow” out of your blog’s WordPress source code, or
- Using a plugin.
Which option should you use?
Manual edit
You are a control freak, aren’t you? Hacking your WP source code isn’t hard, but it can be tedious, especially as updates become available. This means keeping track of your changes and making sure they aren’t erased when you copy over the upgrade files.
I don’t do this to the WordPress sites I manage because it’s too much of a bother to keep track of the edits. Laziness certainly plays a role, too.
Online marketing guru Douglass Karr said he had troubles with the Do Follow plugin and developed his own hands-on solution. In his blog, he gives some tips on how to manually pluck the nofollows out of your comment section.
Plugins
Perishable Press provides a comprehensive list of dofollow plugins. I picked the DoFollow plugin due to its very simple options. Others allow you to specify how many comments a commenter must make, or what length of time must pass, before his or her nofollow is removed.
No spam
I already use WP-reCAPTCHA to prevent comment spam and have Akismet, which comes with WordPress, turned on. Between the two, and moderating my own comments, spam *knock on my wood desk* isn’t much of a problem. Because I “trust” the comments I approve on my own blog, I’m not worried about blog spam, either.
Why nofollow?
Philosophically, the automatic inclusion of nofollow in WP comments makes some sense, especially for bloggers who lack tech savvy or install a blog and forget about it. But moderating your comments and installing basic anti-spam plugins is all a blogger really needs to fight evil spam. Having nofollows around blog comments hurts legitimate efforts to illuminate discourse and drive link love to useful sites.
Discussions about nofollow continue. Here SEOmoz talks with Google’s Matt Cutts, who helped develop the tag in 2005.