There’s been a lot of discussion about the nofollow attribute in links, and its relative merits. For those of you who aren’t total nerds like me, when you create a hyperlink on a web site – for example, Stafford Federal Student Loans, you also in doing so “cast a vote” for that web site in search engines. The more people who “vote for you” with links, the more your subsequent votes count for. A while ago, search engines announced that adding an attribute called “nofollow” in your links would effectively cancel your vote. That way you could theoretically link to a site you disagreed with while not promoting them in search engines.

One little known fact is that in Wordpress, the software that powers this blog, comes with nofollow enabled on all comments. Ostensibly, this was to reduce comment spam, which sadly hasn’t happened. However, by having it built into the software, it DOES prevent you from voting for the sites of people who leave comments. Since all comments on my podcast blog are moderated, only the ones that I approve of get published – which means that theoretically, I’d also approve a vote to the people good enough to participate on my blog.  Wordpress by default prevents this.

I’m pleased to announce that there’s a modification that you can make to Wordpress that turns these votes back on. Effective immediately, if your comment is good enough to publish here, it’s good enough to vote for and give you some additional popularity in search engines. Nofollow on comments is now disabled.

Want to do this on your blog? Here’s a link to the site where I found directions.