WordPress.org

Author: Bill Lipa

This plugin is for bloggers who are concerned about the SEO impact of allowing comment author links on their posts. While WordPress by default applies the nofollow attribute to such links, which was thought to preserve link juice for the original site, recently Google announced a change in the PageRank algorithm. The impact is that nofollow links now leak link juice.

Google says not to worry about this for blog comments, but it is not clear how exactly they compensate for this effect, or if their compensation method works perfectly for all blogs. One way to work around the change in nofollow behavior is to replace HTML anchor tags with a different HTML element and add the link functionality with Javascript. If search engines do not realize that the new element acts as a link, then the original behavior of nofollow will return.

This plugin replaces the standard anchor tag for comment author links with a bold tag and adds javascript behavior on the new tag to allow it to be clicked.

It also contains code for Thesis theme users to remove the redundant link on comment avatars.

Note: this plugin uses the Prototype library, which adds 38K to the page. The library is delivered using the Google content delivery network, which optimizes geographic delivery and has excellent compression and caching settings.