WordPress SEO Comments and rel=nofollow

Update February 2010 Google no longer honors the nofollow tag! Instead of protecting the PR/link benefit it used to conserve for non nofollow links, it now DELETES the PR/link benefit! Stupid move by Google as it again forces webmasters to look for alternatives to nofollow to protect PR/link benefit when linking to sites we do not wish to promote!

My advice do not use rel=”nofollow” on any website if you care about search engine optimization. To get around this issue I created a SEO WordPress Theme that instead of using normal links to link to comment authors URLs it uses form button links (Google ignores them, no wasted PR/link benefit). The Talian SEO theme was updated to the Stallion WordPress SEO Theme which is even better.

WordPress Comments and rel=nofollow

New WordPress installations by default now use the rel=”nofollow” attribute on comment links. If you are not familiar with rel=”nofollow” earlier this year the major search engines (Google, Yahoo etc…) issued a new rel attribute (nofollow) which when used on a text or image link will tell the major search engines to not consider this as a link that should pass link benefit (or PageRank in Google’s case).

Link benefit or PageRank is very important to Google and to a lessor degree Yahoo and MSN search engine rankings, so adding rel=”nofollow” to a link will mean the recipient page will not gain an advantage in the major search engines.

Text links and PR are a major part of search engine optimization, without links (PR) a web site is highly unlikely to do well in Google for anything but the easiest SERPs. This has led to many webmasters willingness to resort to dubious (unethical SEO practices such as blog comment link spamming (I’ve done it in the past).

If you’ve owned a blog that allows comments and to a lessor degree pings/trackbacks for more than a week or two you’ll already know what comment SPAM is. If not webmaster add comments to blogs for a link to their own website(s), that in itself isn’t a problem, but the comments tend to not reflect the content on the blog page, usually comments like “great site” or just a bunch of porn or phone sex text links! Comment SPAM started with individuals posting the comments manually, but now it’s mostly a set of scripts that scan the Internet for open comment pages to SPAM. This blog has had almost 4,000 SPAM comments, almost all caught by various WordPress plugins, so comment SPAM is a major problem for bloggers worldwide!

According to Akismet http://akismet.com/ the vast majority of blog comments are SPAM, 92%!!!

Comment SPAM Statistics

My experience of owning blogs agrees with the above, most comments are indeed SPAM :-( So I fully understand why the WordPress developers have taken this step due to the plethora of blog comment SPAM currently plaguing the blogosphere, but it comes at a cost to WordPress users, real commenter’s no longer get a link back to their site and this is bad for blogging!

The good news is if you are a WordPress user there are tools (plugins) that almost stop all comment SPAM (especially automated comments which are the biggest problem). Like I said above this blog has seen almost 4,000 spammed comments-

Comment SPAM Caught on this Blog

Yet only a couple of manually spammed comments got through, so the tools I use work at filtering SPAM.

List of Comment Filtering Plugins

Akismet http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/ – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.

Spam Karma 2 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spam-karma-blacklist-ban/ – Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress. The proud successor to Spam Karma, with whom it shares most of the development ideas, but absolutely none of the code. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenter’s.

Bad Behavior http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bad-behavior/ – Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.

Bad Behavior stops most SPAMbots at source, they don’t even get a chance to try to SPAM a blog (this saves a lot of time double checking that filtered SPAM is actually SPAM, basically less to check). The ones that get through (not many) are then handled by Akismet and Spam Karma 2 (they do the same thing, well). These two plugins filter the remaining SPAMMED comments, but doesn’t immediately delete them (deleted 15 days later), giving you a chance to recover any posts that are not SPAM (it happens).

You may ask why use both Akismet and Spam Karma 2 if they both do the same thing? Well recently one of them went down recently and thousands of WordPress blogs got a lot of SPAM, since I run the two plugins my blogs remained SPAM free.

I’m that happy with the SPAM filtering that I’ve removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute from comments on this blog and if it goes well will do the same on my other blogs. If you’d like to remove rel=”nofollow” from your blog it’s quite easy.

Removing rel=”nofollow” from comments from a WordPress blog

Find the file

comment-functions.php

In the folder

/wp-includes/

Look for this (around line 360).

$return = “<a href=’$url’ rel=’nofollow’>$author</a>”;

And change to-

$return = “<a href=’$url’>$author</a>”;

Save the file and upload to your sites server. The Authors comment links will no longer have the rel=nofollow attribute. Links within the body of the comment will still have the nofollow attribute added, might remove that if this works out well.

My only concern is manual comment SPAMMERS now, but I don’t think it will be a major problem (time will tell).