Installed NoNoFollow Plugin
…is a very simple WordPress-plugin to remove rel=’nofollow’ (as proposed by Google) from links in comments in WP’s output.
This plugin checks the date of any comment and removes rel=’nofollow’ if the comment is older than a configurable number of days. This gives the site admin a chance to remove comment spam whithout the risk of Google following the links.
This will hopefully make hyperlinks in comments and on my site more relevant to search engines. It offers encouragement to legitimate commenters to post legitimate links on the site.
update 10-29-05: Nonofollow wasn’t working correctly all the time and I didn’t bother to figure out why so I’ve switched to a different nofollow plugin, DoFollow. I’ve tried it out and it works very well. Note that it is a filter plugin… it doesn’t alter the database like NoNoFollow (I believe) attempts to do. This is probably a good thing from a forward compatibility standpoint.
Wouldn’t adding this only encourage spammers to make comments and clutter up your posts?
Yes, if I didn’t keep up with my spam. I have it set to disable nofollow after 7 days. But very rarely (if ever) do I allow spam to remain on my blog for a whole week.
Since spam never gets the benefit of sticking around for a week, it never gets its nofollow tag removed. The downside is that legitimate comments take a week before their nofollow is removed… but that’s not so terrible. I might up this to 14 or 21 days. I believe that it’s less important that brand spanking new comments be approved quickly; it’s more important that the archives look good for posterity and searching.
I agree, good comments should get the google rank, you can also use something like Spam Karma to limit the spam
I’ve been using Spam Karma and Bad Behavior for a while. They are absolutely essential for maintaining a WordPress blog
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