[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #10550: nofollow attribute added to comment_reply_link function

[WordPress Trac]

#10550: nofollow attribute added to comment_reply_link function
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 Reporter:  seo-dave      |       Owner:            
     Type:  defect (bug)  |      Status:  new       
 Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:  Unassigned
Component:  Comments      |     Version:            
 Severity:  minor         |    Keywords:            
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 Wasn't sure if to list this as a defect or enhancement, it's a defect
 IMHO.

 Within wp-includes/comment-template.php there are nofollow attributes
 added to the "reply to comment" links.

 For search engine ranking reasons this is not a good idea. Since I've had
 trouble explaining this to non-SEO's (I'm a search engine optimization
 consultant) I'll explain the problem in detail also see
 http://wordpress.org/support/topic/287704?replies=1 and
 http://codex.wordpress.org/Talk:Template_Tags/comment_reply_link.

 The original use of nofollow was to stop PR/link benefit passing through a
 link in effect saving the PR/link benefit. For WordPress that meant you
 could by default add nofollow links to commenter's links and to some
 degree protect WordPress blog owners from link comment spammers.

 Google has recently reported http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-
 sculpting/ that they now treat nofollow links differently, rather than
 protecting the PR/link benefit of a nofollow link, they delete the PR/link
 benefit!

 What this means to the average WordPress blog owner is a LOT of PR/link
 benefit is lost through nofollow links and a lot of this could be through
 the relatively new reply to comment links.

 If you have a highly commented site and have WordPress set to have  50
 comments per page, that's 50 reply to comment links with nofollow added.
 Since Google now deletes the PR/link benefit that would normally go
 through those links (if it lacked nofollow) a page/site could easily loose
 over half it's PR/link benefit just because of implementing the reply to
 comment links!

 For those who don't understand PR/link benefit: PR/link benefit is shared
 equally through all links (internal and external) from a page, so if there
 are in total 100 links on a page and 50 are nofollow, 50% of the PR/link
 benefit from that page will now be deleted by Google, it used to go to the
 non nofollow links!

 In a perfect world we'd no longer use nofollow anywhere, unfortunately I
 don't have an easy to implement solution for this problem regarding
 commenter's links, but there is one for the nofollow attribute on the
 reply to comment links and that is remove the nofollow attribute or at
 least make it easier to remove at theme level (I understand there's a way,
 but I couldn't find it/figure it out).

 David Law

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10550>
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