Most WordPress blogs these days use nofollow tags – a Google promoted device to make a vague attempt at stopping link spam. i think it may have also dampened the desire to debate on blogs though. The debates are now being dragged into Facebook groups or back behind walled gardens at Google’s expense as well as the public’s.
What do you think? nofollow free – good idea or bad?
Regardless of your opinion, here’s how to eliminate nofollows in your comments:
I am experimenting with two plugins to do this “Nofollowfree” and “Nofollowcasebycase“. Not sure which is the better yet. To install a plugin to WordPress you really need FTP access to your WordPress site. You download the plugin, and then unzip it (Don’t try and put a zipped file onto the server. It doesn’t work). The unzipped contents should, themselves be in a directory and need to be put in the wp-content/plugins directory on the server. For some people, that will be /public_html/wp-content/plugins.
That’s not it though. You then need to activate the plugin from within WordPress. Log into the /wp-admin area and click on “plugins” on the far right of the screen to do this.
Dixon.
11 Comments
Koral · 12th June 2008 at 2:31 pm
I think the do follow is a good way to get more comments.
It’s like giving more back to the visitors.
Pittsburgh SEO · 20th June 2008 at 8:31 pm
I think the growing popularity of nofollow is really going to harm the internet in the long run. The internet was created by sites linking to one another and then search engines created bots to crawl those links. If the search engines stop crawling links then we’ll be missing out on a lot.
Just my 2 cents.
CryStyle Las Vegas · 10th August 2009 at 6:47 pm
Definitely a good thing seeing how you loose that link juice if you don’t pass it on now anyways. Check out matt cutts latest on this.
brett maxwell · 27th September 2009 at 8:17 am
I notice you’re back to nofollow, any update to why?
Dixon Jones · 28th September 2009 at 5:16 pm
Argh! Because I blinked and a plugin screwed up! 🙁 Now I’m going to have to work late! Thanks Brett.
Dixon Jones · 28th September 2009 at 5:21 pm
There! fixed.
steve long · 29th September 2009 at 2:40 pm
hey just a random question: where did you get this beautiful theme? i like it! 😀
Sydney SEO Recovery · 4th August 2015 at 2:37 pm
I have to agree, nofollow free allows an inventive for webmasters to comment with some reward. However plugins and mechanisms need to be put in place to battle pure spam or comments that provide little value.
Akismet as well as Delink Comment Author help but an active and on the ball admin or editor is a big part of the equation.
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