I was reading a post on Binary Moon today and felt compelled to leave a comment.  While doing so, I noticed something that said “dofollow” and clicked the link.  It seems there is a plugin I had not heard of called “dofollow”.

Written in the base code of WordPress is a “nofollow” command.  This means that when a search engine crawls your site it does not count the web pages entered by your commenters.   This has been in there for a while, and was done to combat the number of comment spammers who were over running the web.  However, with the addition of so many spam killers, I can’t tell you the last time a spam comment made it to the site.  And even if one does, I delete it within an hour or two.

Well, it seems the “nofollow” no longer makes sense, and someone wrote a plugin to turn it off.   It’s a nice way of thanking your commenters, and giving them a little link love for commenting on what you wrote.  Once installed, you can select the option for it to wait for a comment to turn X number of days old before it will remove the command, giving you time to delete any potential spam comments.

I have now installed it, and barring any hiccups, I will be leaving it there as a “thank you” to everyone who leaves a comment.  I highly recommend everyone with a WordPress blog do the same.