For those of you not aware, WordPress automatically adds ‘nofollow’ to all hyperlinks left in comments. This means that none of these links count towards Technorati or Google rankings, and you gain little link benefit from leaving them.

The reasoning behind this was that it would dissuade Spammers from leaving comments purely for the benefit of gaining links, and increasing the visibility of their spammy sites in search engines. It didn’t work, as although my anti-spam plugins like Akismet stop them reaching the blog, I have to delete these spammy comments daily - some of them contain hundreds of links, and are several screens long.

So, as it hasn’t stopped spammers even slightly, why not reward good commenters by re-enabling ‘dofollow’? That’s what I’ve now done, by installing the Link Love plugin on Blog-Op, so every time you leave a comment, you get a linkback to your site - you don’t have to put it in the body of the comment, the one embedded in your name will do the job fine. I will of course, still hunt down and delete spam, even manually entered crap like I had this morning Mr ‘Directtv’

An added feature of this plugin I like, is that it doesn’t kick in on a commenter until a set number of comments has been reached, to try and reduce the ‘drive by commenters’ getting the benefit. It’s set to 10 comments, but is easily configurable, and I’ve changed it to 2 - leave 2 comments, and every one after that gets some link love.

Thanks to Ben at the Instigator blog for putting me onto this one.

Any comments?