With so many tools available to combat WordPress comment spam it has never made sense to me that WordPress automatically adds rel=nofollow to your user commented links. The idea is that reducing incentive for comment spammers would somehow reduce comment spam.
Because comment spam is mostly done by automated bots and requires almost zero effort, reducing the effectiveness of comment spam will never actually make it too much work to bother doing. Yet on the other hand meaningful hand-written comments do require effort, so allowing WordPress to add rel=nofollow to them seems counter intuitive at best.
WordPress plugins like Akismet, Bad Behavior and many others, combined with the option to moderate user comments before including them, mean that comment spam really isn’t a problem at all.
If you want your blog to catch on fire you’re going to need your peers to contribute with informative relevant comments on your posts. Allowing WordPress to automatically remove incentive to comment on your posts by disabling any Google link-juice back to the user’s site is like flame retardant for your blog.
Fortunately I’m not alone in my view and there is now an movement established called You comment, I follow. If you want to remove rel=nofollow from links on user comments in your WordPress blog you can use the DoFollow plugin or any of a number of similar WordPress plugins.
If you’d like to fly one of these cool banners on your own WordPress blog, you can get them Randa Clay’s site by following the ‘You comment I Follow’ link above.
Tags: blogs, comment spam, nofollow, WordPress
This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 1:28 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Is NoFollow Flame Retardant for WordPress Blogs?
With so many tools available to combat WordPress comment spam it has never made sense to me that WordPress automatically adds rel=nofollow to your user commented links. The idea is that reducing incentive for comment spammers would somehow reduce comment spam.
Because comment spam is mostly done by automated bots and requires almost zero effort, reducing the effectiveness of comment spam will never actually make it too much work to bother doing. Yet on the other hand meaningful hand-written comments do require effort, so allowing WordPress to add rel=nofollow to them seems counter intuitive at best.
WordPress plugins like Akismet, Bad Behavior and many others, combined with the option to moderate user comments before including them, mean that comment spam really isn’t a problem at all.
If you want your blog to catch on fire you’re going to need your peers to contribute with informative relevant comments on your posts. Allowing WordPress to automatically remove incentive to comment on your posts by disabling any Google link-juice back to the user’s site is like flame retardant for your blog.
Fortunately I’m not alone in my view and there is now an movement established called You comment, I follow. If you want to remove rel=nofollow from links on user comments in your WordPress blog you can use the DoFollow plugin or any of a number of similar WordPress plugins.
If you’d like to fly one of these cool banners on your own WordPress blog, you can get them Randa Clay’s site by following the ‘You comment I Follow’ link above.
Tags: blogs, comment spam, nofollow, WordPress
This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 1:28 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.