‘Follow me’ by Kitten Betty from Flickr. Used under licence.

Back in 2005, Google announced a way to ‘prevent comment spam’.

The idea was to specify a “nofollow” attribute to all external links from “any link that a user can create on your site”.

Wordpress followed suit, and added code to use this tag in all comments in blogs. I use Wordpress (I recommend it, indeed) and therefore have been automatically adding “nofollow” to all comments on my blog.

However. I also only allow authorised comments. Leave a comment here, and you’ll find that it’ll spend a while before appearing, as I hit a button to accept it, assuming it’s not spam and not off-topic.

Therefore, given that I’ve specifically allowed all comments - including URLs - to appear on this blog, I am therefore standing by those comments and the URLs they post; and therefore, I see no reason why Google can’t use the links on this website to calculate page rank.

So, I’ve added the DoFollow plugin, and all external links from this website are now visible to Google, and other search engines.

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