Page 10: WordPress Comments are “nofollowed” by default

Be default in WordPress all of the comments carry the “rel=nofollow” tag, meaning search engine crawlers will ignore those links. Read about nofollow at Wikipedia, and the official google blog, and the WordPress Codex nofollow page. Nofollow was created to try and curb the problem with “blog spam”, but in reality many bloggers feel that it’s cheating them out of link juice back to their site. When you comment, you also create a “backlink” in the search engines to your site, and the “nofollow” tag tells the crawlers to ignore that. In response, “dofollow” plugins were created for WordPress to turn the “nofollow” added to comment links off. On this blog I use the dofollow WordPress plugin, but the follow URL WordPress plugin does the same thing. Andy Beard has a Constantly update list of nofollow and dofollow plugins as well.