WordPress Tips: A Gift To Your Commenters

Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 1 of November , 2007 at 10:56 am

A long time ago, WordPress decided to include the “nofollow” tag for the comments section of all WP powered blogs. What this does is tell the search engine spiders to ignore the links in the comment section of your install, providing no search engine love for people nice enough to leave you comments. The idea, at the time, was to combat the tremendous amount of comment spammers out there who were trying to advertise their gambling and medicine sites.

With much improved anti-spam plugins out there now, and WordPress’ own Askimet spam system, it’s not really needed any more, but the code is still in the system. There has been no mention of it ever being removed, and that’s just a sad state of affairs for people who leave legitimate comments on your blog(s).

So, someone decided to write a plugin that removes the “nofollow” command, and allows your commenters to get their links to their sites counted by the search bots. It’s fairly small in size, so it shouldn’t hurt your content-to-code ratio much, and it’s just a nice “thank you” to those folks who leave you a comment. If you’re worried about spam comments still getting through, you can change the options on the plugin to remove the code after X number of days so that you have time to go in and delete the comment before it counts. (My rule of thumb is two days)

While you may ask “Yes, but what does this do for me?”, it’s just an easy way to build goodwill with your readers. And if enough people do it, and you then start leaving comments also, you will receive the backlink counts also. And, as it is in comments, it shouldn’t do anything to harm you with the new Google PageRank system either.

Give it a shot, show your readers that you appreciate them.

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Category: WordPress tips

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