How to Be NoFollow Free

In writing the Death of NoFollow post, I came across a great post by Dixon Jones on how to go about removing the automatic nofollowing of comments in Wordpress.

Going noFollow free in the comments raises several issues, the chief of which is spam. That ugly thing where low-life types try to take advantage of anything in their way to promote whatever they promote. My solution is as follows:

Use the Akismet plugin that comes preinstalled with wordpress 2.5.1 (if you aren’t using this or later, why not? Upgrade already! ).
Turn comment moderation on for every comment. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s better to moderate 100 worthwhile comments than to let one x rated comment through, IMO
Install Delink Comment Author by Alex King… This allows you to keep those comments that say “nice post” without the nasty X rated link
Install the NoFollow Free plugin. This removes the auto “nofollow” tag from comments on a wordpress blog

The major positive in going nofollow free on your comments is that you aren’t being stingy with your “link love”. Whether or not it actually give any value is dubious, as I have said before, but because nofollow is so entrenched in many people’s minds, perhaps going nofollow free will make others more inclined to comment, if they KNOW the search engine spiders will check out their site through the link they get by commenting on your post.

So what do you think? Workable solution? Do you propose a better one?

PS If you are using Firefox, there’s an addon from Search Status that allows you to turn on highlighting of nofollowed links, so you can see exactly what’s going on. Check it out, I nofollowed the above link just so you could see it in action

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