There has been a large push toward removing the NoFollow tags, given that software such as Akismet has been very effective in keeping out spammers, amongst many other reasons, that Loren Baker succinctly defines in this post.  I have installed Semiologic’s DoFollow Plugin for WordPress.  In support of my readers and commenter’s, this blog now provides link credit to any commentors publishing legitimate comments.  If I discover any abuse, those commenter’s will be barred from using their URL’s!

For those of you without too much SEO background, a few years ago there was a large spate of comment spam in an effort by Search Engine Marketing (unethical ones, at least) to artificially increase their Search Engine rankings by using automated systems to spray comments across thousands of blogs.  Google and other search engines used to look at these incoming links as being a vote of confidence or link credibility for the site in question.  This caused havoc in the blogosphere!  Since then, the search engines agreed to implement a way of providing the opportunity to link to a website, but not allow credibility to be transferred across, denoted by a tag.

WordPress (the software used for this blog) installed this by default, but for the reasons described in Loren’s blog post, I have decided to remove this tag from the site and all legitimate comments will count as a link back to the website of any author.

I reserve the right to deactivate this feature if abuse becomes prevalent!  Happy Commenting!