Why I Altered My WordPress Code To Disable NoFollow

by Phil Buckley on February 3, 2009

This morning I changed line 148 in the /wp-includes/comment-template.php removing the rel=nofollow tag.

This comes from a desire to let people who contribute thoughtful comments at my site to get some love back from me.  The decision is also partly due to the great filtering that Askimet does sniffing out blatent spam.

Photo by: bettyx1138

Photo by: bettyx1138

I am a fan of sculpting your own site using nofollow, but why not pass along the small amount of link juice that their comment will drain. We all drink from the same watering hole.

Before the latest WordPress update you needed to add a plugin to use the nofollow attribute, but now it is a core feature. I understand the logic behind that change, but I think in the future it should be an option, not hardcoded.

I urge anyone else who wants to join the dofollow crusade to join us, by updating your core code like I did.

Let the commenting begin!

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Test February 3, 2009 at 10:07 am

Viagra Casino Mortgage :)

2 tahir April 9, 2009 at 7:40 am

why your abusing title tags in you links

3 Jack Clarke April 27, 2009 at 6:21 pm

I have installed DoFollow on all my blogs hopefully this will attract more visitors and more links for everyone.

- Jack

4 Holistic Weight May 8, 2009 at 12:59 am

Yes. Making your blog do follow is a lot better then making it no follow. One thing is more people comment on do follow blogs then no follow because google spiders follows their links into their website which everyone loves. Yahoo and MSN bots are stupid and follow everything so lolz.. but I appreciate your link love. One thing I hate about commenters is they make 1 line comments or 2 word comments and expect us bloggers to approve their comments. We give them more love then the content they gave in return. Grr

5 Bushe August 9, 2009 at 9:07 pm

Would you be interested in writing for The Neave Online Publication? I love your writing style and I feel like you would fit in perfectly with the other writers.

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: