WordPress is considered one of the most popular blogging and content management systems worldwide with millions of users, developers and theme designers.

wordpressComments represent an integral part of WordPress. In addition to allowing the interaction with the blog visitors, the comments enrich the blog content especially in the eyes of the search engines. However, one of the deficiencies with WordPress is the fact that all the links in the comment data and the commentator website field are assigned a nofollow attribute, which can be very discouraging for the commentators due to the fact that the nofollow attribute leave no positive effect on the ranking of the URLs mentioned in the comment.

I can understand that the usage of “dofollow” URLs in the comments may encourage the posting of the spam comments, but at the very same time, the blog owner should have the right of rewarding the commentator by back linking to his site. WordPress KeywordLuv and Dofollow plugins come to the rescue. Dofollow removes the nofollow attribute from the links in the comment. On the other hand, KeywordLuv allows the visitor to select the anchor text that he wants for his website.

It is very important to note that KeywordLuv won’t have any SEO value for the commentator site without the presence of the Dofollow plugin. The other day, and after posting a link for my Linux Hosting website on a blog which implements the KeywordLuv plugin, I found out that the link had a nofollow link, this is probably due to the fact that the site didn’t implement the Dofollow plugin. It might be good to check the previous comments links with Firebug or Google Chrome Inspector to verify that they don’t have nofollow attributes.

Blog Comments is a great way to build back links, but should be mixed with other back linking techniques for a site to have a good ranking on the search engines.

 

About the Author: Khaled Shihabi is the co-founder and web developer @ Linux Hosting, a website which provides reviews for the Linux web hosing providers.