This Blog Says No to NoFollow in Comments

August 22nd, 2007 at 3:40 pm

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.

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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.

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Comments 3

  1. KMC wrote:

    Alex, I agree 100%. I disabled nofollow a few weeks ago. It’s becoming a movement.

    Posted 22 Aug 2007 at 10:32 pm
  2. Alex Choo wrote:

    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
  3. woungudgeda wrote:

    Interesting and informative, but would participate in something more on this topic?

    Posted 11 Feb 2009 at 11:39 am

Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1

  1. From ωþτΔ Comment Thanks Plugin: Thanking your Commenters - WP Text Ads Blog on 23 Aug 2007 at 3:33 pm

    […] be grateful to readers who write thoughtful comments. One way we can show our appreciation is to remove the nofollow attribute in […]

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