As you may know if you have your own blog, one way that spammers try to get more traffic to their sites is by bombarding blogs with bogus comments filled with links to their own sites. Since search engines such as Google look at how many incoming links a site has when determining rankings, this comment spam can increase a spammer’s Google rankings and therefore his traffic.

There are many ways to cut down on comment spam, such as comment moderation, captchas, and spam-filtering plugins such as akismet. Another way is to add rel=”nofollow” attributes to links in comments and trackbacks. Google and other search engines will ignore such links, rendering them useless to comment spammers trying to raise their search engine rankings. WordPress and many other blogging engines add these nofollow attributes by default.

But what about honest commenters? Shouldn’t they be able to get some traffic and “Google juice” from participating in your blog? Well, there are many WordPress plugins that will take out the nofollow attributes from your comment links.

My favorite solution is a plugin by Kimmo Suominen called DoFollow that will take out the nofollow attribute if a comment is on your site for a set period of time (you choose how long). This way, you don’t have to lock down all comments for moderation before they can be approved — as long as you remove any spam comments that get onto your site within the time window, the spammers still can’t get any Google juice.

Kimmo’s site was down for a bit, but it’s now back up, and I’ve got his DoFollow plugin installed here. So link away in your comments — as long as your comment’s not spam, the nofollow attribute will be removed 24 hours after you post the comment.

Finally, Andy Beard has posted a nice comprehensive list of nofollow-removing plugins for WordPress and other blogging engines. Check it out here.

This is a little customization I made to my site’s WordPress theme that I thought might be useful to others.

My Problem

I wanted my site’s homepage, kolossus.com, to be my blog’s homepage, so that my most recent posts would show up there. No problem… But I also wanted my site’s homepage to have an introductory blurb at the top listing my most recent projects. The blurb is kinda big (I am partial to my mascot), and it really doesn’t belong on any page other than the site root.

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