Got Wills

I was just reading through the April issue of Website Magazine and found an article about Dofollow Blogs. I wasn’t aware of it, but most blogs add a rel="nofollow" attribute to links inside comments. I checked this blog, and lo and behold, it did the same thing. I didn’t like that at all, link love is one of the few benefits you get for reading and commenting on blogs. So, I immediately went to work to fix this.

The first solution I found was a plugin (more like 10 of them). I was scanning through them to find one that would definitely work with WordPress 7.1 and stumbled across an article on Perishable Press that explained how to do it without a plugin.

So I SSH into my server and find that the file mentioned in the article doesn’t exist in this version. Hmm, this article was written in 2007, I imagine WordPress has changed some since then. So, I take a guess at which file might hide the functions with the offending nofollow… and what do you know? I found it my first try.

So anyway, here’s the good stuff you’ve been waiting for. To make your WordPress 2.7.1 blog DoFollow just edit the file wp-includes/comment-template.php line 148:

From:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

To:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external' class='url'>$author</a>";

Basically, take out the nofollow and preceding space.

To future commenters (and past commenters), you now get some link love. Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.