I asked Sumeet Jain if I could republish this post of his here, because though I had heard of the issue, I didn’t fully understand it. He was more than happy to agree. I thought it best to include all parts of his article including comments. I encourage you to check out the links along the way for more information and an additional tutorial should you decide remove nofollow yourself. –ME “Liz” Strauss

no more nofollow
by Sumeet Jain

Monday, December 19th

If you’re a blog owner, please pay attention. Early this year, Google announced the nofollow value for the rel attribute. This made it possible for blog owners to stop Google from crediting sites comments link to. This was mostly received positively and most blogging platforms picked it up. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform, includes nofollow by default. The logic behind the move is to shut out comment spammers by not rewarding them. Whether or not that’s an effective way to shut them out is not what I care to discuss. I dislike nofollow because it’s antithetical to the web.

So I’ve removed it from my installation of WordPress, and I encourage you to do the same.

Removing nofollow yourself:

Open wp-includes/comment-functions.php.

Find “function get_comment_author_link”
Replace “return = “$author”
with “return = “$author“.
Save and close.

Removing nofollow via plugin:
I haven’t tested any of these, but they’re available nonetheless.

DoFollow

Follow URL

For an detailed explanation of why nofollow is bad, check out NoNoFollow.

COMMENTS

a little birdie named Jem told me,
There’s more to getting rid of nofollow that editing wp-includes/comment-functions.php – I wrote a tutorial on it AGES ago. 🙂 You can find it here: nofollow removal tutorial

i thought about it and responded,
Hi Jem, thanks for the link to the tutorial – nofollow certainly has been around long enough that many tutorials were written. I wanted to wait a bit and see what kind of reception it got and impact it had on the community. It’s sad that the way it was used was simply to stick it in all the comments – like a blanket solution to a very intricate problem.

It might have been nicer if platforms like WordPress were strategic in their use of nofollow. For example, if a blog has moderation enabled, then all comments can at least be shown initially but have nofollow included. I can definitely see a couple uses for it, but it really is unfortunate that the only prolific use of nofollow was to kill linking.

As a side note to others reading this, Jem’s tutorial will remove nofollow for links within the comment as well. For example, the link to her tutorial in her comment above would not have the nofollow value. Some of you may like to maintain that value while others may not.

a little birdie named Jem told me,
“like a blanket solution to a very intricate problemâ€? – I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I don’t have anything against those who choose to use nofollow, although I don’t believe in it myself.. my major problem with it when I used WordPress was that it was forced upon people. Why not have it as an optional feature? Of course, it’s not a problem for me since I coded my own weblog, heh.

i thought about it and responded,
I do have something against those who choose to use nofollow. It’s likely my own ignorance, because I can’t think of why they would use it.

a little birdie named Tauquil told me,
I’m all with you on this one.

i thought about it and responded,
Glad to have your support, Tauquil. I noticed that your blog is one of the few that does follow links. Props to you.

You’ll find this post and the follow-up post here:

This article: no more nofollow

The follow-up post: nofollow advocacy

–Sumeet and Liz

Related articles:
How to Code Accessible Links–Part 1
Blogger/ Firefox–Editing Trap
Blog Construction–What’s Your Function?
Use Bloglines OPML to Find Interesting Blogs