While looking for ways to increase the popularity of my blog, I came across an article about having a nofollow tag in your blog comments. Basically, most blogs out there allow people who comment to input their name, email and website, however, when the website URL is displayed to the end user, it is actually hidden from search engines with the following bit of code:

rel="nofollow"

The way I see it, there are pros and cons to removing the “nofollow” tag. Pros are that it will help increase the pagerank of all of the people who comment on posts on your blog and/or it will increase your own blogs pagerank with increasing number of comments that you leave on other blogs that do not use the “nofollow” tag. Cons are that it can definitely increase the amount of spam that a blog gets. For instance, my blog currently gets between 200-500 spam comments per day (depending on how lucky I am that day), I expect this to increase significantly once the spammers realize that I have removed the “nofollow” tag from my comments.

If you’d like to get your WordPress blog onto a “dofollow” list, simply go into your /wp-includes folder and find the file called “comment-template.php”. On line 48, I had the following line of code:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow'>$author</a>";

Simply change it to:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external'>$author</a>";

I haven’t yet promoted the fact that my comments are no longer “nofollow” comments, but I’ve read quite a few articles of people raving about the success they’ve had by removing the “nofollow” attribute and changing their comments section to more of a “dofollow” type of layout. So if you’re blog has a list of other blogs that have a “dofollow” or a d-list, please add my site to the list.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback.

47 Responses



Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>