Banishing “Nofollow” for user content
The NoFollow attribute for all user generated content was originally intended to combat blog spam. The theory was that a spammer could increase their page rank very easily on search engines by spam commenting hundreds of blogs. By adding a NoFollow attribute automatically to user contributed content, we would enable search engines like Google and Live Search to know which links to not follow and thus not count towards page rank calculations.
However, today there are so many great anti-spam tools for blogs such as Akimset or the even better Spam Karma 2.2 (which I use). These tools are making blog spam a thing of the past. Spam Karma is catching 10-15 spam comments a day for my blog which is pretty telling since I have relatively low traffic site. These types of anti-spam tools are making the NoFollow attribute unnecessary; Real commenters should get recognized for their contribution, have their links crawled and positively affect their page rank.
After doing some digging, I found 2 Wordpress plugins that will prevent the addition of the Nofollow attribute:
- Remove NoFollow - Strips Nofollow from the author URL but leaves in for any URLs appearing within the comment itself. Exactly what I needed and what I’m using.
- Link Love - Removes Nofollow from comments after a commentor has made a configurable number of comments. Cool idea if you need this type of power, which I personally don’t.
I’m sure there are many more plugins out there that will strip Nofollow, some of which will give you much more control. The point is that everyone should be using an anti-spam plugin and abolish the addition of the Nofollow attribute. Share the crawlable love!
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