What’s rel=”nofollow”?
By default, whenever anyone comments on your blog WordPress will add rel=”nofollow” in the link. I didn’t realize this was something that WordPress actually did… but I was curious why anyone would utilize it.
Google actually utilizes rel=”nofollow” to simply ignore a link when calculating a website’s Pagerank. The theory behind automatically adding this information in blogging content engines was that it would dissuade comment spammers from clogging up blogs. The problem is that comment spammers really don’t care about their site’s Pagerank… they simply care about getting the link out there for people to click-through on.
As a result, “nofollow” may actually hurt good blogs instead of helping them. If you’re as picky as I am about approving comments, you only allow comments in your blog that add to the conversation. If one of my readers throws a link in there to a great tool or another post that may support or argue what my post is about, that site does deserve credit that they are being referenced.
So tonight, I installed the Dofollow plugin to each of the blogs I manage for my clients. All of the blogs have strict comment management so I’m not concerned with comment spam getting through.
Additional Info:
- WordPress on nofollow
- Wikipedia on nofollow
- Dofollow Plugin for WordPress. UPDATE: 10/13/2007 – this plugin was actually breaking some of my comments so I removed it. Read my post about hacking the WordPress source code to remove nofollow from the source.
