I decided to join the Do Follow movement, which is… the opposite of the No Follow movement. The nofollow attribute was intended to discourage comment spammers by telling search engines not to trust links posted by visitors in blogs and forums. However, the spam problem has not gotten any better.
Despite the relentless efforts by spammers to pollute my blog, spam comments are not getting posted here. It is thanks to my triple threat spam fighting strategy. Since the bad links aren’t getting posted in my blog, and the good ones are, I might as well disable nofollow.
I do believe that Do Follow is not for everybody, though. I think it would be best to have nofollow implemented by default in applications that are vulnerable to comment spam. If people aren’t going to protect their sites from spam, they might not bother implementing nofollow manually and consequently not all of their user-contributed links should be trusted.
There are a lot of plugins to remove nofollow from links. I did some research for ones that would fit my needs. What I really wanted was to be able to have the option to add nofollow on a case by case basis for non-spam yet cr@ppy links. I found one that was even called that but it didn’t work… perhaps because it was tested through versions up to and including 2.2 and I’m using 2.3. I decided upon NoFollow Free because it almost does what I want. I can’t nofollow based on urls, but I can do it based on a couple of criteria.
I reserve the right to edit, delete or mark as spam any comments that are intended solely to get links from my blog, and basically abuse my trust, and consequently the trust of my visitors.
I don’t know if people request to be on those do follow sites lists, but I would appreciate not being on such lists since it could end up directing comment spammers to my blog. I won’t object to regular links, though.