Design Adaptations has an informative piece about the rel=”nofollow” link tag that WordPress uses by default. The relative newb that I am, I never realized what it’s for. It was originally intended to thwart spam bots from mining the links out of comments. But with really good blogging anti-spam measures these days (Akismet and Spam Karma 2 — I use the latter), that pesky nofollow tag becomes a bit dated. Says WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg 1:
Even WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says NoFollow was a failure; In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.
Not least of all, the nofollow tag also squashes search engine placement for your commenters. Yeah, not very courteous, huh? News to me to. So I took the advice of my betters and installed a dofollow plugin. Seems to be working nicely!
Footnotes
- quote courtesy Search Engine Journal
