Tom Raftery’s Social Media

When Google announced the nofollow attribute, they said that it should remove the motive for comment spamming.

A nobel ideal - however, Google failed to roll it out in a recent overhaul of the comment system in Blogger.

WordPress have included it as the default action in the latest version of WordPress but they haven’t included a switch or toggle to turn it off.

I found the code to be altered to be in wp-includes/comment-functions.php on line 173.

Simply change

rel='external nofollow'

to

rel='external'

and save if you don’t want nofollow on your commenter’s links.

In my case, I’m happy to have nofollow off as I am very vigilant about spam (I custom write my .htaccess file I have wp-hashCash installed and I moderate comments so no spam is ever published on my site).

And I’m not sure I trust Google and how they are implementing the nofollow tag.

UPDATE:
pericat contacted me to say that to completely get rid of all references to the nofollow attribute from WordPress, there are other changes to be made as well.

In the file default-filters.php, delete line 29 -

add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'wp_rel_nofollow', 15);

and in functions-formatting.php you need to delete lines 490-494:

function wp_rel_nofollow( $text ) {
	$text = preg_replace('|<a (.+?)>|i', '</a><a $1 rel="nofollow">', $text);
	return $text;
}</a>

and you also need to delete from the make_clickable function on lines 482-489, the code

 rel='nofollow'

- there’s a leading space in front of the rel