In writing the Death of NoFollow post, I came across a great post by Dixon Jones on how to go about removing the automatic nofollowing of comments in WordPress.
Going noFollow free in the comments raises several issues, the chief of which is spam. That ugly thing where low-life types try to take advantage of anything in their way to promote whatever they promote. My solution is as follows:
- Use the Akismet plugin that comes preinstalled with wordpress 2.5.1 (if you aren’t using this or later, why not? Upgrade already!).
- Turn comment moderation on for every comment. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s better to moderate 100 worthwhile comments than to let one x rated comment through, IMO
- Install Delink Comment Author by Alex King… This allows you to keep those comments that say “nice post” without the nasty X rated link :)
- Install the NoFollow Free plugin. This removes the auto “nofollow” tag from comments on a wordpress blog
The major positive in going nofollow free on your comments is that you aren’t being stingy with your “link love”. Whether or not it actually give any value is dubious, as I have said before, but because nofollow is so entrenched in many people’s minds, perhaps going nofollow free will make others more inclined to comment, if they KNOW the search engine spiders will check out their site through the link they get by commenting on your post.
So what do you think? Workable solution? Do you propose a better one?
PS If you are using Firefox, there’s an addon from Search Status that allows you to turn on highlighting of nofollowed links, so you can see exactly what’s going on. Check it out, I nofollowed the above link just so you could see it in action :)
Just a quick note about nofollow and spam. Spam is bad for blogs and other sites too, as it creates what I call web rubbish, making a mess of otherwise clean web site. It must be fought, and removing unrelated spam comments or preventing them in the first place is the correct solution.
Nofollow is an attempt to take control of search engines, and tell them what to index and what to leave alone. However, that logic is flawed. It’s the job of the search engine to determine which links to index and which not to; which pages are relevant and which ones aren’t. If the SEs can’t do that, then they’re no good. Attempting an user-driven relevance model will not work, since it’s either automated making it useless, or not done, making it useless.
Excellent post. I always recommend something to what you do above, but instead of the 2 plugins you recommend (DeLink and NoFollowFree), I tend to use Lucia’s Linklove plugin.
It gives you more control over which links to follow/nofollow including the ability to only start following comments after someone has left a certain number of comments on your blog.
Much recommended
Yeah
I shoud remove nofollow to
Simple, useful and step by step. That’s the way of developing a good post, and exactly what I was searching for elimination nofollow. Congratulations for it.
That was some great simple advice. Being able to moderate all your comments is essential to keeping you website spam free.