Free link love with every comment

Inspired by Tino Triste, I have decided to remove the rel=”nofollow” tag from the comments links in this blog, to reward people who leave relevant comments.

The world wide web was designed precisely to to be made out of of sites linking to each other and this principle is used to determine the strength, relevancy, and popularity of a site by Google’s page rank algorithm. Then due to blog comment spammers and robots, Google and other search engines decided to introduce the rel=”nofollow” tag, which basically means that a link with that tag has no weight for search engine rankings at all. Wikipedia took up this option readily, and unfortunately so did WordPress in the default state. But comment spam did not decrease significantly, in fact it has probably increased regardless, so it seems unnecessary to penalise the genuine comments, or for that matter the useful external references on Wikipedia.

So I switched it off.

How? I thought I could just edit the comment module of the theme but it’s embedded far more deeply than that. So I used Kimmo Suominen‘s DoFollow 3.0 plugin