Wordpress makes your comments suck.
I have to apologize to my readers. It’s not the easiest thing to do, mind you. But when you’re wrong, you’re wrong and I don’t like to be a hypocrite. You see, my last entry from the forefront of Social Media was a boot to the groin of the Big Wiki’s embrace of the rel=’external nofollow’ attribute on it’s links. While I’m not apologetic of my stance, I’ve been forced to realize that I too have been using this power to devalue your links.
What happen? Somebody set up us the bomb.
That’s right, as it turns out, being new to using Wordpress for a personal blog, I was unaware of their unadvertised ‘feature’. What you say? Apparently Wordpress has rel=’external nofollow’ on by default without an option to turn it off. According to sources, the purpose behind this is to deter and prevent comment spam. According to reality, that’s a bunch of shit. And really, what could be more social than a blog? It’s people sitting down and sharing their thoughts, feelings, plans, and schemes and then allowing others to discuss those. It’s the very backbone of conversation: talking and listening.However Wordpress works hard at taking the relevancy out of your conversation as best they can. Since at least version 1.5 all your comments are belong to no one. And yet the spam continues like a Monty Python sketch on repeat. Go figure.Well, no longer. As of now this site is running 2 very fine plugins that will allow you to not only fix what has unwilfully been imposed on you, but give Wikipedia a bit of a bitch-slap too. DoFollow Wordpress Plugin:
This is a plugin for WordPress that will disable the automatic rel=”nofollow” attributes added to external links. Additionally, for those of you with open comments that want to make sure you’re not giving relevancy to SPAM, you can set an age limit for this feature that will only remove the “nofollow” after a certain amount of time.
but what about bitch-slapping the whore of the internets smoMashup?
Wikipedia NoFollow Wordpress Plugin:
This quick and easy to install plugin is but a fraction of retribution for the crimes against the web that the big wiki has committed. In short this automatically adds rel=’nofollow’ to all outgoing links to Wikipedia.org, regardless of language.
It’s time you take social media back to the place where you got it from.. society.
If you have a Wordpress blog, I urge you to use the first plugin. For as long as Wikipedia strives to discredit your relevancy, I urge you to use the second.
Special thanks to the very followable Lyndoman who alerted me to the ‘link lite’ status of this site.
posted by greg :: Feb.02.2007 ::
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Hmmm, a bloody truth of WordPress…
Good move
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use nofollow for other things though
or real dynamic links
Good to see you sharing the link love again
Thanks guys. I agree Andy, there’s a time and a place indeed. Just didn’t like that it’s that way by default without a ready option to turn it on/off. It’s on now though so enjoy and encourage those around you to do it to!
I just recently installed DoFollow and I’m hoping that way more Wordpress bloggers get on the ball in the near future. I’d really love it if they would allow us to turn “nofollow” on/off on a per post basis. I don’t mind if it defaults to “on” as long as I could be able to turn if off for intelligent comments/trackbacks. I’m all about sharing the link juice.
I just hack the wordpress software whenever I do an install for myself or a client and do a couple of quick mods like removing the “nofollow” and fixing the so that it is more SEO friendly.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
I definitely think this is the right direction to be going. It has clearly showed that blogs still having/using the nofollow tag is still being spammed. Just have some good spam protection and you’re all set.
Yeah, I never bought into that SPAM logic.