The One-Minute Dofollow WordPress Upgrade

Published Sunday, September 9, 2007 @ 8:14 am • 12 Responses

Want to upgrade your blog to official dofollow status but don’t want to install another unnecessary plugin? This article explains how to eliminate nofollow tags from all trackback, pingback, and commentator links in less than one minute..

After finally repenting of my nofollow sins, I began looking for the best way to eliminate the nofollow attributes that WordPress automatically injects into all commentator URL links.

Of course, the most popular technique for removing nofollow attributes from comment links involves one of the many fine dofollow plugins that are freely available to WordPress users. Beyond nofollow removal, many of these plugins also provide additional features, such as control over when and where nofollow tags should be removed. Many of these plugins are highly recommended.

After considering the various dofollow plugins, I came to the conclusion that most of them were simply overkill. My goal was to remove all nofollow attributes from commentator links — nothing more, nothing less. For this site, I just don’t need all the fancy bells and whistles. And I certainly don’t need yet another resource-draining plugin to worry about..

So, I decided to (gasp!) hack the WordPress core itself. It is not only possible to remove all nofollow tags without a plugin, it is absolutely, positively, drop-dead easy to accomplish. Don’t believe me? Check it out..

The One-Minute Dofollow WordPress Upgrade

  • Open wp-includes/comment-functions.php and locate function get_comment_author_link()
  • Within that function, find rel='external nofollow' and delete the nofollow (and preceding space).
  • Done.

And that’s all there is to it. After removing that single parameter, every author link for comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks will be followed by search engines and thus pass link juice to their target pages. No plugins required!

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About this article

This is article #400, posted by Jeff Starr on Sunday, September 09, 2007 @ 8:14am. Categorized as Function, WordPress & tagged with comments, dofollow, hack, links, nofollow, php, tutorials, WordPress. Updated on April 20, 2008. Visited 21450 times.

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12 Responses Jump to comment form

1 • Hell's Handmaiden

November 21, 2007 at 12:28 pm

Nice. I’ve thought about killing ‘nocomments’ but I didn’t much feel like running yet another plugin on my site. Your solution removed that concern. And removing the ‘nofollow’ was every bit as easy as you say.

If I might add, gray text on black is terribly hard to read, especially with a font size as small as you’ve chosen.

2 • Perishable

November 21, 2007 at 1:18 pm

Thanks for the feedback — I am glad you found the article useful ;)

As for the low-contrast text, I totally understand and am working diligently to implement an alternate, high(er)-contrast theme for people to use as an alternate if desired. I am hoping to have it available within the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned..

3 • Hell's Handmaiden

November 22, 2007 at 8:11 am

My blog needs a lot of work too, but things like making money and stupid stuff like eating keeps getting in the way. Hell’s Handmaiden used to be much worse– black with red type. I think you can still get a glimpse of that format at Wayback Machine.

Take care. And again, good information. Thanks.

4 • Shira

December 18, 2007 at 3:48 pm

Hey there, thanks for the post. I am having trouble with receiving trackbacks.. Pings work fine but trackbacks NEVER make it through.. I tried your advice as my final hope, but that didnt work either… Do you have any idea what might be causing it?

And yes, I am allowing trackbacks from the Manage Options page…

Thanks for your time

5 • Perishable

December 18, 2007 at 10:02 pm

Unfortunately, trackback problems are rarely easy to diagnose. Just dig through the WP support forums to verify this. As far as I know, trackback issues were fixed in recent versions of WordPress, so you may want to upgrade if you aren’t running the latest version. Beyond this, there are several things you may also want to try, perhaps before spending the time to upgrade. First, make sure you have a proven system for testing trackbacks. Then grab a theme that doesn’t require any plugins and run it for some specified duration of time, preferably long enough for a trackback to make it through. If you receive a trackback, you have a plugin issue. Otherwise, you could also install a secondary instance of WordPress and check it for trackbacks. Such a test blog on the same domain that does not receive trackbacks suggests a deeper issue, perhaps with some server setting, PHP, htaccess, etc. Similarly, you could replicate your entire blog on a different domain. This will tell you if the issue is related to your particular blog setup or not. Other than that, many of the things I have read while troubleshooting trackback issues of my own dealt with tweaking WP core files, re-uploading files, removing white space at the end of PHP enclosures, and a million other things. If I remember correctly, the problem was finally fixed during my upgrade to a more recent version of WordPress, however, I forget which one..

6 • Black Hairstyles girl

March 14, 2008 at 9:24 am

Is it wise to have a do follow blog. I have an African American fashion blog….and I want to montize it. So do follow allow bots to index information better? Also does anyone know of a good seo friendly wordpress skin?

7 • Perishable

March 15, 2008 at 5:46 pm

Is it wise to have a do follow blog?

Good question, “Black Hairstyles girl”. I think it all depends on your perspective. If you dofollow comment links to show appreciation to people who take the time to share their ideas and contribute to your site, then yes, dofollow is a good idea. Likewise, if you dofollow article links because you have confidence in the target content, then “passing the juice” is definitely an excellent way to leverage reputation and improve credibility.

On the other hand, if you are only interested in exploiting page rank to make money, then dofollowing links is probably the last thing that you want to do. Similarly, if you are selling links and don’t want to get penalized by Google, you should definitely use the nofollow attribute and keep as much of that lucrative juice as possible.

I, for one, am extremely grateful that there are people who are generous enough to share their content and link to others without seeking financial gain. How bad would it suck if everyone used nofollow?

8 • brasscupcakes

April 14, 2008 at 7:08 am

‘Similarly, if you are selling links and don’t want to get penalized by Google, you should definitely use the nofollow attribute and keep as much of that lucrative juice as possible.’

Great dofollow tutorial, many thanks, I couldn’t get the plugin to show up so I could activate it.
This workaround works a treat!

However, I do not understand the above quote, regarding getting penalized by Google.

Do this mean that you actually need nofollow if you use adsense at all?

Not an issue for me at present, but if so, perhaps for us lamers out here, who have adsense or may consider having it in future, you might want to suggest within your article that append the words dofollow to the original comments file so switchback is easy.

Again, thanks for this fix, I love it.

9 • Perishable

April 15, 2008 at 10:48 am

I am not sure about specific Google policy regarding nofollowing Adsense links (or whatever) as I don’t really use any of that stuff, but I am certain you could locate the required information in the official Google guidelines. As for your suggestion concerning the easy “switchback”, I think that is definitely a good idea for those dealing with similar situations. Thank you for the excellent feedback! :)

10 • Antonio Luna

April 19, 2008 at 6:50 am

Great idea. I will do the same in my blog.

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Tons of Firewalls

Tuesday, 7 October 2008, 1:45 am

Recently overheard on conservative talk radio (instructing listeners how to obtain a free promotional video from their new website):

“This website has tons and tons of firewalls, so you have to use your real email address to download the video..”

The Quiet Search Revolution

Monday, 6 October 2008, 12:15 pm

Just a thought.. As awesome as Google is these days, it would suck if they ended up owning the entire search-engine business. When they get to the point where all competition is impossible (due to their sheer size, financial resources, media influence, etc.), how many alternate search engines will have the resources for continuous improvement and top-quality search results? When this happens, we will have no choice but to do exactly what Google tells us to do.

As deeply ingrained as it is for everyone to instinctively and unthinkingly turn to Google for their search activity, it is time to leave a few alternate search tabs open for as much use as possible. Instead of using Google just because that’s what you always do, try your search on MSN, Yahoo, Ask, or any of the other independent search engines instead. Sharing traffic with other search engines is a nice, quiet way to keep the competitive spirit alive and well in the search-engine business.

Disappearing WordPress Posts

Wednesday, 1 October 2008, 7:50 pm

Today I experienced difficulties while trying to publish or even save new posts in WordPress. I would compose the post as usual, add all of the keywords, tags, meta tags, and so on, but as soon as I clicked the “Publish” or “Save” button, the post would just disappear from existence.

The weird thing is that during the drafting process, WordPress’ default auto-save feature showed that the post had been saved at expected intervals. Unfortunately, after trying to publish several different posts, WordPress showed absolutely no record of the posts ever being created. They simply vanished into thin air.

Fortunately, a little investigation revealed the culprit. If you should find yourself dealing with this same issue, here are some different things that you should try. First, re-upload fresh copies of your entire WordPress installation. I don’t know why exactly, but apparently various files can either go stale or completely disappear from the server. Overwriting or writing fresh files may do the trick.

If that doesn’t work, check your WordPress database for errors. In my case, a little investigation revealed that something had caused a couple of fatal errors in the wp_posts table. Fortunately, checking and repairing the table solved the issue.

Tumblr Battles

Wednesday, 1 October 2008, 5:30 pm

Please excuse the duplicate Tumbr posts.. seems there is no way to ping Tumblr to refresh/rebuild the RSS feed according to changes in post content. So, to resolve the issue I have discussed now like two or three times regarding paragraph elements and proper feed formatting, I have no choice but to repost a majority of my text posts.

This is necessary for the proper import and display of my Tumblr feed into WordPress. Currently, there are five items displayed at once, each styled according to proper inclusion of paragraph tags. Thus, whenever the Tumblr feed “forgets” to enclose single-paragraph posts with the proper tags, the result is an unstyled post entry displayed on my site.

Assuming that makes sense, you will please excuse my dust while I repost a few older entries in an attempt to reconstruct (the hard way) a properly formatted Tumblr feed.

More Optimization Measures

Wednesday, 1 October 2008, 5:27 pm

Another important step in improving the performance of my recent redesign involves the optimization of both CSS and JavaScript content. During development there were around 15 server requests for these two types of files, 10 JavaScript files and 5 CSS files. This was okay for my own use, but would not work for production purposes.

Optimizing these file types involves consolidation, compression, and caching. Consolidation of 10 JavaScript files into three is huge improvement. Now I deliver one JS file for the functionality of the site, one for Mint, and another for Analytics. Likewise for the stylesheets; after consolidation, a single stylesheet is delivered to all modern browsers. There are two additional stylesheets as well, but they are targeted at IE6 and mobile browsers and will not load elsewhere.

Once the files were consolidated as much as possible, it was time to optimize or “crunch” them. Using the sexy Flumpcakes CSS optimizer, I was able to reduce my stylesheets by around 25%. Likewise for JavaScript, I used xtreeme.com’s optimizer to shave an additional 20% off the size of my JS content.

Finally, once I had consolidated and compressed my JS and CSS files as much as possible, I wanted to further my optimization efforts by ensuring that these files were cached by the browser. By setting far-future Expires headers for everything but the statistical files, my site gains an additional performance boost by eliminating the need to reload preexisting content.

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