U Comment I Follow

OK, folks. Why didn't someone tell me there was a movement in the blogosphere? I get sidetracked with my move to Florida, and someone started a cause. I love a cause. Any reason to get on my soapbox.

Turn off “nofollow”. Show your commenters that you appreciate them.
Randa Clay Design

This one is worthwhile for all concerned. It involves link love and Google Juice. I've heard of link love, but Google Juice is a new one for me. Anyway, this movement allows comment links to be followed by search engines. Simply beautiful.

Originally, nofollow was created to stop comment spam. That didn't exactly work as planned. Spam still happens. And the only thing nofollow has stopped was link love.

Want to join the movement? First stop is Randa Clay Design to pick out your new badge. All good causes have a badge. This is no different. Here is the one I picked for my sidebar. Go on...pick out a purty one.



Next step is to remove the offending code from your template. Find the following code in your template and remove the code in red.

Blogger Beta (with widgets expanded):

<dl id='comments-block'>
<b:loop values='data:post.comments'var='comment'>
<dt class='comment-author'expr:id='"comment-" + data:comment.id'>
<a expr:name='"comment-" +data:comment.id'/>
<b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'><data:comment.author/></a>
<b:else/>
<data:comment.author/>
</b:if>
<data:commentPostedByMsg/>
</dt>

If spam still concerns you, enable comment moderation. Problem solved.

EDIT 08/24/07: It was drawn to my attention by a reader, Laila, that I removed too many >'s from the code. I corrected the code in Blogger Beta, so what you see now is correct. But, I couldn't find a way to remove it from Classic Blogger to my liking. In doing more research, I found this post that states:

"It is impossible, at this time, to remove NoFollow from Classic styled Blogger templates. This is due to the fact that those templates use the variable {$CommentAuthorName$} which encapsulates the anchor link around linking text."

Until I find a good solution, I am removing the portion of the post concerning Classic Blogger. Thanks, Laila, for making me look into it more!