What the heck is “nofollow” and why should I care? Well, “nofollow” is a value that can be assigned to a link to tell some search engines like google that a link should not influence the link target’s ranking. Basically what you are saying is, please Google don’t let this link, whatever it may go to effect my own personal rankings in your search engine, I also don’t want to give that site in which the link goes to any credit (as a backlink). The nofollow value was originally suggested to stop the insane amount of comment spam in blogs. Removing the nofollow tag from your site might encourage others to participate in your site, posting comments and visiting your site more often since if they do their website will get a backlink credit. As long as the comments posted aren’t blatant spam then it can also help your site by being updated more often and that improves your own SEO rankings.
A lot of time has passed since it was originally created and a lot of technology to get comment spammers in line. But nowadays it is nearly impossible to remove the “nofollow” link in your wordpress blog. Well not impossible but very hard.
WordPress has a few plugins that claim to remove the “nofollow” tag from comment links but most I found just flat out don’t work. I have no idea why but rather than messing with a plugin and trying to figure out how to fix someone else’s work I found an easy way to get rid of that stupid “no follow” tag wordpress puts in all comment links by default.
Look in the wp-includes folder for a file called comment-template.php.
Search every reference of “nofollow” on that page and remove it.
For example you’ll find an entry that says something like
$return = “<a href=’$url’ rel=’external nofollow’ class=’url’>$author</a>”;
Fix it up and it now says
$return = “<a href=’$url’ class=’url’>$author</a>”;
In all you should find about 5 “nofollow” related entries that you will need to edit on that page. Save it and now your blog no longer has the nofollow tag. YAH!