I just installed a plug-in that some of you may be interested in, called “Nofollow Free.” This plugin removes the “nofollow” tags that wordpress automatically adds to any links that are in your comments. The purpose of the nofollow tag is to discourage spam in comments- so why would we want to remove that tag? When people post comments with a link in them it boosts their pagerank in search engines such as google, which, in turn, boosts their visibility in searches. This encourages spammers to post comments with lots of links, so that each one of the spammer’s sites will get the boosts in pagerank. The nofollow tag disables the links from effecting this pagerank. The unfortunate side effect is that comments with legit urls (such as your blog’s url) are also punished. The Nofollow Free tag removes this tag from every url (including the one your name links to if you include your site’s url), allowing your post to positively benefit your pagerank, which gives you a better listing in search engines.

Wouldn’t that just encourage more spam? You won’t have to worry about that, because wordpress.org blogs already come with akismet (their spam blocker) installed. Just make sure you have that plug-in activated, and it won’t be an issue. With akismet running, and the Nofollow Free plug-in installed, we can help each other’s pagerank as we interact via comments on one another’s blogs!