We Have Removed the Nofollow Tag - We Love Comments!
By Paula on Sep 9, 2007 in Blogging
Only just recently I realised that Wordpress places a ‘nofollow’ tag on Comments left in blog posts. Thinking that this was just a default and that I could override it, I went searching in my Wordpress admin panel for an option to do just that. Well to my surprise there was none. Not sure why Wordpress feel they need to protect us by not adding a simple option like this but there you go. So next step was to find a plugin for it. Fortuantely this wasn’t too difficult and I found a great list of the different types of plugins over at Andy Beard’s website.
I chose the Dofollow plugin as it seemed the quickest and easiest and it turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought. Just download the file and copy the extracted folder to your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate the plugin in your Wordpress admin panel. That’s it! - too easy!
Now if you have gotten to this point and have no idea what the ‘nofollow’ tag is then you deserve a medal for sitting through all this geek speak. Nofollow is an attribute that is added to the code in a link and what it does is tell the search engines not to follow the link. So in other words, if you have left a Comment on this blog and added your website link then if the nofollow tag was applied the search engines would not follow the link through to your website. Basically it was introduced to stop the spread of spam on the internet.
We believe that if someone leaves a comment that is worthwhile and provides value then they deserve a unobstructed link back to their website so we have removed the nofollow tag on all comments.
We have set our Comments options to ensure that no comment goes live unless it is approved by us so we will see how all this goes. Bear in mind that leaving comments like “great post”, “cool” and so on will not be approved. Also comments that are obviously used word for word on multiple websites will be deleted. We have already received some of these and although we have approved a couple it is not likely that any new ones will be approved.
We definitely love comments so if you have something constructive to say then let us know.
Steven Snell | Sep 9, 2007 | Reply
I think that’s a good decision. I did the same thing about a month ago and I’m glad I did.
Joe | Sep 10, 2007 | Reply
Hey Paula,
I too added the DoFollow plugin a while ago because if someone takes the time to add to the conversation they deserve a little link love.
However, with a lot of the same type of “non-comment” comments I felt it was necessary to write a Comment Policy so people knew what was and was not acceptable.
Just a suggestion, add a Comment Policy and make it prominent for commenters to read (a link to the policy page).
Paula | Sep 10, 2007 | Reply
Thanks Joe, I will put that on my list of things to do.