I’ve just installed a plugin that removes the ‘nofollow’ attribute in comments.
My reasons are simple:
-
I appreciate readers who write thoughtful comments. They deserve to get a vote of approval from my blog back to their sites.
-
Askiment does an excellent job of catching comment spam. Since I check my blog daily, I can clear up whatever it misses out.
-
Spammers will continue to spam anyway, and even when nofollow is enabled, the readers of this blog are going to suffer for it. The solution is to build a better trap to catch spam, and not penalize the good people instead.
-
What useful purpose does ‘nofollow’ serve then? There is nothing deceptive about the remaining comments to require it.
I wonder why I didn’t do this earlier. 
The developers of WordPress ought to have an option to disable ‘nofollow’ in the default install. In fact, it should set this option to off by default.
Like this post? Buy an ad and drive visitors to your site
About the author
I'm Alex Choo and I live in sunny Singapore. I'm also the developer of WP Text Ads, a WordPress plugin that lets bloggers sell ads directly to advertisers so that they pay 0% in commissions and earn 100% in profits.
Feel free to drop me a note anytime you wish. You should also subscribe to the low volume email announcement list for WP Text Ads below.
Comments 3
Alex, I agree 100%. I disabled nofollow a few weeks ago. It’s becoming a movement.
Posted 22 Aug 2007 at 10:32 pm ¶Yeah.
Talking about movement, I started a new movement on paid review disclosures today. It’s about time we got one. I’m never sure if reviews are objective anymore.
Posted 23 Aug 2007 at 2:07 pm ¶Interesting and informative, but would participate in something more on this topic?
Posted 11 Feb 2009 at 11:39 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
[…] be grateful to readers who write thoughtful comments. One way we can show our appreciation is to remove the nofollow attribute in […]
Post a Comment