NoFollow No Mo’ – Removing NoFollow from WordPress Comments
April 6, 2007 | Comments (29) | Filed under: SEO
Starting today, I’ve decided to remove the NoFollow attribute from all comment posters here at Bookmark Bliss. By default, anyone who includes their webpage URL in the appropriate field when submitting a comment has the NoFollow attribute attached automatically to that link. This “theoretically” tells Google and other search engines not to follow that link when determining pagerank and assessing linkbacks from a blog.
This was originally conceived as a way to discourage spammers from posting on your site, but the 1,323 Akismet blocked spam comments on this site alone gives me the impression that it’s not working very well, if at all. I think the NoFollow attribute hurts contributors to my site more then it hurts would be spammers. As I mentioned before, active commentators can really influence a lot of new would be visitors for a site and I think it’s unfair to strip them of the one bonus they receive for doing so.
I’ve been running the Top Commentators plugin for a while already, which gives a free linkout to the most active commentators, and I will continue to run it in addition to making this change. My goal with this site is to encourage an active community and by giving incentives to comment I think it will go a long way to achieving that goal. I trust the spam tools I have in place now, and I am very active in policing my own site and won’t hesitate to remove comments I think are there for nothing more then the linkback.
So, before you go and post “Nice Site!” or “Good Post!” as comments, you’ve been warned 
The plugin we used to take care of this is the sem-dofollow plugin. It was absolutely painless to install, and it seems to work like a charm. For our regular readers, I encourage you to do the same and install this plugin on your own site. Many high profile Blogs are starting to do the same and it really helps out our entire community.
If any of you have any suggestions or experience with converting your own site to remove the NoFollow attribute, I would love to hear from you. Let us all know your experience in the comments below!
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29 people have left comments
Hey! Good news for other bloggers!
I am almost a novice blogging and didn’t know that there is the “Nofollow” option in wordpress, I am going to change it as well,
Regards
Yeah! I’m totally onboard with the no “nofollow” program. This should be an option within the WP admin. Sort of the final step in incrementally optimizing a blog for comments.
1. Install Anti-comment-spam
2. Allow Comments
3. Tweak Blacklists
4. Turn off NoFollow
I still like the idea that it is turned “on” by default for those that don’t have a handle on spam.
Disabling nofollow is a popular trend sweeping across several blogs that I routinely read. I’ve also followed this trend and turned it off on both of my blogs. Originally, I tried a plugin called something like “Link Love” that allowed you to set a comment threshold before nofollow was disabled for a particular individual. I’ve since uninstalled it and just went with a straight forward disablement of nofollow for all comments. Made no sense to for my site to require a certain level of participation because I want to encourage any level of participation in whatever way possible. Now, anyone who comments gets the benefit of a link back. This has been a great change in the blog-o-sphere and I can personally say that I have directly benefited from this change. Thanks.
Nice work. It would be great to give a linkback to those who deserves it. Usually, it will be turned back on at higher PR, since people are more likely to abuse the goodwill.
Yeah, as it stands right now, we generally average maybe a half dozen comments a day. I can easily manage to double check those posts and I’ll just rule with an iron hand. If you post something that I think is there just for PR abuse, I’ll yank it.
One great thing about WordPress is that from the administration menu, there is an entire section devoted to comment administration. I don’t even have to find my original posts, it combines all the comments on one page and I can delete them with a single click.
If at some point in time we start getting hundreds of comments a day, then maybe it won’t be so manageable. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you guys know if my comment stats go up or down after the change and whether or not my spam numbers increase.
@Tour Pro
I think step #5 might also be requiring registration for comments. Over at my site, Askimet fails me from time to time. I know sites with hundreds of comments each day (e.g. Lifehacker) require registration.
Anyway, just my two cents. This is my first time finding and reading this blog. I’ve got to say it’s a gold mine.
Want to tell everyone that you’ve turned off the nofollow in your comments? Check out my new “ifollow” logos- grab one for your sidebar!
http://randaclay.com/archives/the-i-follow-movement
Great! No follow means no backlinks, no backlinks means no votes for your site, no votes for your site means you’ll never be on search pages. Man! I just noticed this nofollow on my blogs, never though about it. I though the Internet was based on links between sites and nofollow kills it?
I’ll try removing nofollow on one of my blogs ans see if changes anything (not sure but don’t want to be wrong). If everything works fine, I’ll remove it on other two blogs.
Thank you.
I have just added the Sem DoFollow plugin to my blog. I think it will ultimately bring in more readers and encourage more comments. Thanks for posting this and thanks for the link to the plugin.
How do you find your readership since you have implemented this?
Hey this is indeed a nice idea. I think from now on every webmaster you should do the same thing. Maybe soon I’ll implement it on my blog. It’s a good karma. Learn to give and you shall receive.
More bloggers will follow this movemement the better for us all! Keep it up!
Cool!
Nice!
Cool.
Cool.
Cool…
Cool.
Nice…
Cool…
Cool!
Thanks for the explanation and the do follow plugin tip. We’re slowing growing an active community of new and expecting parents on our blog, and I’m sure our visitors (many are bloggers themselves) will appreciate the linkback!
Dr.MOZ
Thanks for your article. I believe this is useful for someone who want remove nofollow from their WordPress blog
So is this working for you? I just notice that you have a lot of comments in this post with the word ‘cool’ and ‘nice’. Obviously these guys are just out to get a link back and nothing more. I would like to remove the ‘nofollow’ from my blog but I wonder whether it will just introduce these types of commments.