Stripping the NoFollow Tag From Comment URLs
Once you know a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes of websites, blogs and traffic, you’ll stumble across some advice telling you to leave comments in the blogs of other people. It was believed that this would create a backlink to your website – and help you move up the Google rankings and/or get indexed more quickly. This piece of advice became redundant a few years back though, when the default setting on comments in blogs was changed to “nofollow”.
Nofollow – What is That Then?
Before the nofollow tag was set, if Google’s crawler visited the other person’s blog, it would find your comment, spot your website url and go off to investigate your site. When nofollow was set, this stopped. The tag told Google’s robot to not follow the link! Ooh er missus! So, all that time you spent commenting on people’s blogs was wasted. Well, it turned out that most comments weren’t real people like you and I at all. Spammers had written nifty little automated robots that simply wandered around the internet leaving comments on everybody’s blogs. A number of blogs do not moderate their comments, so when you post a comment it appears on the site automatically. What these robots did, therefore, was to create hundreds/thousands of links back to their cr*p site, with rubbish on it. Selling you meds, or similar things you had no interest in!
So the nofollow setting was applied across Wordpress blogs by default. Which put a stop to a lot of spammer activity.
However, used properly, a link from a relevant website/blog to your website can be of use. So the Wordpress dofollow plugin was born! Yes, there really is a Wordpress plugin for everything.
Wordpress dofollow plugin
If you want to set your blog up so that people leaving comments have the links followed, then you’ll want to download and activate the Wordpress dofollow plugin, which is available from one of the sources listed below:
Where to get the Wordpress dofollow plugins
Wordpress dofollow plugin
Wordpress Follow URL Plugin (I find this very slow loading, up to 45 seconds, and sometimes my browser says it’s not responding … but it ends up all OK if you’re patient!)
NoFollow Free – with this one you can specify that commenters have to post X number of comments before their links become a DOFOLLOW link. You can set different values for non-registered users and registered users. This blog is set so that registered user comments are DOFOLLOW by default and non-registered users have to have made a few comments (2 at the moment, but I might change that!) before their links are DOFOLLOW links.
All the dofollow plugins above are linked to the official Wordpress pages, so they’re fine. Here’s the Wordpress plugin page that talks about them if you don’t believe me (as if!):
http://codex.wordpress.org/NoFollow#How_Do_I_Disable_Nofollow.3F
I hope that’s been helpful to you. Good luck with your blogging/website!
