Recently I became aware that the default installation of WordPress marks all comment links with the rel=’nofollow’ tag. The effect of this tag is that search engine spiders such as GoogleBot will not follow the link to your site, thus the only effect of the comment is if a human follows the link.
The origins of the nofollow tag are steeped in the early days of blogging where spammers were common place, and spam control mechanisms were not. The nofollow thus presented the nefarious activities of the spammer resulting in a profit from the increased sales of whatever product they were pushing.
In the current day however there are multiple spam control options available to combat this disgraceful activity. In fact one is shipped with WordPress by default in akismet. They are very effective and constantly updated. They are not faultless so the blog administrator should review all comments. However, the amount of illegitimate spam is vastly reduced. As a result the nofollow tag is less a legitimate spam control mechanism.
Given the effects of the spam control mechanisms I believe that commenters should be rewarded for their commentary. So I thought I would check the WordPress Dashboard and look for a simple toggle option for enabling/disabling the tag. Unfortunately, it is not a natively user configurable option. I hope that makes it into WordPress 2.5.
As such I have over the previous few days been investigating ways to remove the nofollow tag from comments. After a brief Google search I found the dofollow plugin by Kimmo Suominen. The plugin is highly configurable, but as mentioned earlier an administrator should still check comments regularly to ensure they are relevant and are not some clever spam.
I also found a complimentary plugin called CommentLuv. This plugin will interrogate the supplied URL and if possible retrieve the commenters last blog and place a direct deep nofollow free backlink to it. In this way other blog commenters will see potentially interesting content and visit. Further, search robots will also follow the link to the post.
With these natural advantages I decided to display that SCHWOIT is a proud believer in the I Follow Movement. Again looking at the fiddyp site I found the fast friends follow fair comments post. I liked the design and so decided to integrate it with my design. It is displayed in the header floating over the Bird Of Paradise leaf.
I am a proud member of this movement and encourage all bloggers to embrace the movement.
