I just edited the files in my wordpress template to remove all traces of the rel=”nofollow” attribute from links in this blog. All links, including those in comments and signatures, are now your basic bog-standard “follow” links.
I never liked Google’s PageRank method of ranking sites based on incoming links. Google’s PageRank has been almost singlehandedly responsible for the inundation of blog spam, comment spam, forum spam, and even referer spam in every corner of the web.
Now, Google expects webmasters and bloggers to clean up the mess by lodging a vote of “no confidence” in every user-generated link.
Nope, that doesn’t work for me. I moderate comments to this blog, and spam won’t appear here because I won’t let it. I’m not part of the problem here, and it’s not my job to penalize people who engage in blog discussions by no-following their links.
Addendum: MaxPower explores and explains the NoFollow failure in more detail. I particularly like this line:
If you run a website with no comment spam, why would you discount your links? Why help Google penalize fellow bloggers?
I always subscribe to every blog I find that doesn’t use nofollow for comments.
For now I am still using the do follow plugin on all my blogs, rather than editing the core due to all the security updates for WordPress.
I do use nofollow to cultivate pagerank, and stop it going to places that don’t really need it, or to control the flow between internal pages.