I probably should have done it a long time ago, but I finally removed the nofollow attribute from my comments. Now there is yet another reason to leave comments here.

In doing this, I did not want to add another plug-in to my site and just edited the code in WordPress to remove it. The process itself is quite easy and shouldn’t take you long to do. In fact, it will probably take longer to read the directions than to actually remove the tag.

One thing I would like to add though, is that it may be a good idea to make a copy of the original file before editing it. I did this by simply making a copy of the file in the same directory with ‘.original’ added to the end of the name. This way if something gets messed up or you want to undo it in the future you can simply copy the original back.

Now, this is fine and dandy, but if you want some more advanced functionality, there are also directions for having different behavior for trackbacks and pingbacks available.

In a related note, something that I found that may be useful in the future is how to setup a blacklist for the nofollow attribute to be added to specific people’s comments. This could also be easily switched around to create a whitelist instead.

One suggestion I would make if you are doing a blacklist/whitelist setup is that rather than using the suggested code, I would try to find a way keep the list as a separate file so as to be able to easily add and remove names. Another suggestion is that you could test for the domain that it is going to rather than the author’s name.

At any rate, I encourage everyone to remove the nofollow tag. It’s easy to do and doesn’t take very long at all.