In the last week or so it seems everyone is getting their overly concerned about the ‘No Follow’ tag that wordpress adds to commentators website link on comments they leave.
For those who don’t know, the ref=”nofollow” tag is a tag you can add to links to tell google not to follow that link.
I’f im honest im totally baffled why people are so concerned about this. I understand that people want to reward their commentators but surely any benefit from leaving your link to your comments comes from visits from that page and not the tiny page rank allocation you could get from it. The page rank of actual posts is rarely as high as the home page and any seo benefit will be low due to dozens of other bloggers leaving their url as well.
But i still want to reward my commentators
I know some blog owners want to reward all commentators and remove the nofollow tag. For example, David Culpepper from ProBlogging is keen on removing it (good blog, worth a read!).
Ok. You have two options.
- Show Top Commentators – This wordpress plugin shows the top x commentators on your blog and no rel=”nofollow” tag is attached. So your best commentators are rewarded.
- Edit your Comments Template – To remove the rel=”no follow” tag for all commentators you need to edit just one line in one of your wordpress files. Open up your wp-includes/comment-template.php file in a text editor (i use TextPad). The line you need to find is :
$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow'>$author</a>";
It will depend on what version of wordpress you are using but it should be around line 48. Simply remove the nofollow tag so that the line now reads :
$return = "<a href='$url'>$author</a>";
I wish i could say there was more to it but thats it. Upload your comment-template.php file and broadcast to the world that commentators get some ;link ;love’ on your blog. I edited my template as well. If you leave a comment on this page, view the source of the page and find your link and you’ll see that the ‘nofollow’ tag isn’t attached to your link (think that means ive now jumped on the ‘no follow’ bandwagon!)
Hope you find this helpful 
These are definitely the best ways to encourage comments, and I've tried implementing both, but have had horrible trouble. The Recent Comments widget shows the entire title of the post and the user, rather than simply showing a user id. So the recent comments widget gets to be too long for the page. Also, I can't get Top Commentators to work with the widgets plugin. Always messes up some how… Anyone else have this problem? Any Help?
-Sam from MarketMatador.com
I've been using DoFollow for sometime now and participated in all of the hype surrounding it by leaving comments on posts like this. I think it does build more of a community as encourages comments which is what we all like to see right?
I even had a same question!!!! i wasn't good about wordpress. .
Thank you mate. This helped me alot. I'm not a programmer, but found your tutorial really helpful. I have installed a wordpress blog on my website and I was not aware about how to remove no-follow tag. Your tutorial helped me alot.
Cheers!