WordPress &”rel=nofollow”

In the previous post, I speculated about the market for offshoring comment spam.

Jack asked:

Maybe I’m missing something, but it isn’t it a bit odd for ‘Carter’ to include a rel=”nofollow” in the link they left, thereby making Google ignore the link?

Good question. I wasn’t aware of the rel=nofollow and did a bit of research. Little did I realize that I was wandering square into a bit of controversy….

As it turns out, wordpress automatically adds rel=”nofollow” (or some variant) to all of the URLs that appear in any comment. The goal is to make wordpress based weblogs completely unattractive to link whores.

As it turns out, this particular decision caused a hell of a lot of controversy. In particular, it assumes that every single comment on a wordpress weblog should be treated as spam in, at least, that any posted links should not be considered by the various search engines.

Now, considering that I have had exactly 2 pieces of comment spam out of 230 comments on my relatively low traffic’d weblog, the ratio of signal to noise in the comments on my weblog is really high. If anyone comments on my weblog, I would like them to get “link karma” for said comment.

Actually, I don’t really care about that. What I really care about is the theme of this weblog: …so google can organize my head.. There has been a number of times where I have commented on other’s weblogs or someone has commented on mine where that comment has sparked a flurry of very useful activity — much more useful than the original post on either weblog. The end result is that Google crawls these links, tallies the additional link activity that invariably ensues, and the most useful comment or response-post bubbles up in the search results. In other words, ensuring that Google can crawl the links in my weblog’s comments ensures that google is maximally organizing my head! Goodness knows, I could use all the help I can get…

So, Wordpress chose to add nofollow to every link in the comments with no option to disable this feature. This created a hell of a lot of controversy.

Fortunately, wordpress is quite modular and supports plugins. I grabbed this nofollow plugin and now any URLs that appear in comments will no longer have the nofollow spam preventative.

Since Wordpress automatically emails me every time a comment is posted and that email includes a “click here to delete” link, I generally catch spam within hours anyway. If spam becomes a problem, I can move to this slightly less efficient plugin that will add nofollow to all comments until they are more than a few days old, giving the moderator a chance to delete the comments before Google indexes.

I can pursue more drastic measures if it comes to that.

Jeez. Spam sucks. Someone should collect the names/addresses of known spammers and ensure that they are signed up for every mailing list and marketing scam known.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 11:03 pm and is filed under Irritants, Technology, Weblogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.