Get more comments- Allow NoFollow in wordpress

Savvy webmasters want links back to their site or blog. Think about it. If you were building a site and wanted to be part of a community to bring others back to you, would you post comments where you get no credit? hmmm

Some people disable html in their comments… BOOO! Whats with the ego? yes yes. I understand. too many outgoing links, lower PR. but why not get more people to your site participating??? More participating visitors interested in what youre saying.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what others have to say…

“A blog using rel=”nofollow” by default is no blog for me. I definitely hate it to link to such blogs. Many others feel the same and stop linking to those offering trackback links that are worth absolutely nothing. This is bad for a network like the internet, bad for search engines and in the end its bad for everyone because search engines cant rank good things as they normally should be ranked.

On the other hand I needed a possibility to manage spam links with care in order to protect myself against loosing search engine trust rank. So I had to develop something that helps me to do that.”

This comment is from the guy who wrote the plugin, NoFollow case by case

And the movement is growing. More and more webmasters would not waste their time on a blog if they cant get a link back. What would be the point?

How to Fix this Nasty Mess
There are two ugly little pieces of code built into wordpress that adds the nofollow attribute to link tags.

There are 2 ways to go about giving this code the boot on your blog.

• One is with a plugin. There are tons of em. You can use nofollow case by case
• Semiologic has a good one called DoFollow
• and there is entire lists of plugins for happy commenters.

Now for the Hack
There are two steps to this hack. I was snooping in WPs files and I found half of the equation.

In your wp-includes folder (not in content) find the file comment-template.php
search for the word “follow”.

Change this line:

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

to this:

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

…basically just delete nofollow

The 2nd hack I had a little trouble finding so I sought help from Douglas Karr on his Marketing Technology Blog

Next find the file default-filters.php in the wp-includes folder
search again for the word “follow”
comment out the code with tow // before the line:

add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'wp_rel_nofollow', 15);

like this:

//add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'wp_rel_nofollow', 15);

Thats it.

How can you be sure its working?
Part of Firefox’s SEO extension tells Firefox to highlight nofollow links. If you don’t use firefox, or want to know how it works, watch the video on SEObook

Happy Following!