WordPress: Removing Nofollow Without A Plugin

By Vlad Zablotskyy August 16, 2007 Bookmark and Share

As favor to me, Dane from Blog Strokes had provided a detailed tutorial on how to remove nofollow in WordPress without a plugin. I believe that many other bloggers can benefit from his tutorial.

The reason I have asked Dane this question was that for last few days have been testing my website (hopefully when most of my readers were asleep), with Lucia’s CPU hogging detection plugin to find out if any of my plugins hog the CPU resources.

Everything seams to be pointing to my DoFollow (by Kimmo Suominen) pugin – particularly if on those few posts that have 20+ comments. Also it is possible that for your themes to cause CPU overload if it is “widgetized” so I have decided from this point on avoid using widgets on this blog- at least until I find a good dedicated hosting.

The changes that Dane has provided on his blog are dead simple one’s the only drawback that you will need to repeat them every time there is another WordPress update.

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  • Wouldn't you know, I found this ten minutes after my partner installed the Do follow widget :P hehe. I've just stumbled this to him, hopefully we will have this one nipped in the bud before we have a problem .. thank you!
  • It's a good idea to hard code this, but as you mentioned, you'll have to remember it when you upgrade wordpress.

    Jim Westergreen has a great page on wordpress SEO at his blog. I won't post the link because I'm not sure what you have your filters set at, but it's easy to find.

    WordPress is a great blog platform but it's very SE UNfriendly if you don't take care of a few things first.
  • This is a nice way to encourage comments on blogs, but it also encourages meaningless comments like 'good stuff' and 'great work here'. I am not sure what is worse, but as a benefit to your blogging friends comments shouldn't be nofollow.
  • @John

    With so many plugins out there your argument is not longer valid. Sure some crap will sneak in- no reason to treat your regular readers like crap.

    That's right if you "nofollow" your comments you say you do not trust those leaving comments on your site nor do you trust their websites.
  • Get em Vlad ;) That's right. With Spam Karma, Akismet etc. comment spam isn't much of an issue anymore. People still love to use that excuse so they can nofollow their comments though.

    Personally I think Lucia's linky love is the best. That rewards regulars and nofollows one-time comments.
  • @Josh,

    You know what really pisses me off? The "spam" worried bloggers get less than 100 visitors a day maybe a spam comment a week. My blog gets about 10-20 spams a day still something that can be managed without a plugin. Plugins just simply make this argument old and no longer valid.

    Now I am not in favor of two sentence comments, but if they are made by some one that has no intention to spam your blog they should stay.

    Comments short or long are still content. I stopped counted the times my posts would come up in in google for keyword found in the comments.

    I am getting tired about the nofollow BS as a way to fight spam.
  • John
    I agree with you guys. I occasionally check spam though and still weed out comments that are legit. I am a bit of a worrier, and have been fighting a bit of spam in these links. Starting a new blog makes it easier to see about this (before the spam becomes too much to sort). Nofollow is a Wordpress rule, and really, many people using Wordpress aren't geeks like me and don't really care about nofollow. I still, however think the game is changing again and it could be of concern later. The Spam industry is always evolving, just like the web....

    I do plan on changing to follow. I think a plugin that allowed you to set a threshold of comments, like if you pass 2 comments, and all your links will change to nofollow would be better. You can adjust the number of links per site.. Just to ttry to avoid crappy comments...
  • John,
    Just a suggestion for you. Pay attention how you input the url of your blog when commenting. Try to click on your name and see where that link will take you. You did that with your first comment as well- but I have corrected it. ;)
  • The blogstroke link does not seem to work. :(
  • Thanks Ken,

    I think that blog went down since I wrote this post. I will have to correct
    this.
  • We're kinda torn on the issue of DoFollow vs NoFollow. While we're well aware of the supposed benefits of NoFollowing every link from your site, they just seem a bit.. Shaky. And besides, shouldn't it be the search engines' priority to detect and filter out spammy links? It's also hard to shake the feeling that NoFollow is destroying the essence of the web - people getting kudos for their work. I'm very tempted to DoFollow my own blog. Thanks for the heads-up on how to do so.
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