No NoFollow, No Plugin, No Problem! Three Simple Steps!

Vlad the Affiliate sent me a WordPress Code question through my contact form. You can ask me a question too, and I'll post the answer for you here.

Vlad has been following the discussion on Andy's Blog about CPU issues with LunarPages hosting accounts. He says that while his blog is smaller and receives less traffic than Trisia's Blog, he too has had problems with his host telling him his wordpress installation is too CPU intensive.

Vlad thinks he has narrowed his biggest problem down to his use of a dofollow plugin. When a post has several comments and receives a significant amount of traffic, it seems that all of the modifying of the already modified links in the comments section really puts a strain on his server.

Vlad needs to throttle back some of the resource usage, but at the same time he wants to continue to offer followed links to people who comment on his blog. He asked me if I could show him how to disable nofollow without using a plugin.

I, of course, couldn't refuse Vlad.

Before we start, lets go over a couple of important notes.

1. You will be modifying the core WordPress Code in order to do this. These are simple edits, but it is a modification to core files.. That means, make back ups and test it, don't just trust me. It works here, I'm using this on this blog right now. But it might come out differently for you and your configuration. If it does, let me know and I'll see what I can figure out.
2. This posts assumes you are using WordPress version 2.2.2. This will probably work fine with some other recent versions, but I make no promises, and won't even think about looking at problems you run into until you are running 2.2.2.
3. If you use a lot of plugins, and your host is giving you grief, this is a start, but you may have other problems as well with other plugins (or with your host - I use and recommend http://hostforweb.com/).
4. Every time you upgrade WordPress you will have to re implement these changes to remain a dofollow blog.

Okay, now, there are three steps to disabling nofollow in your comments and the second two are optional. Just depends on how dofollow you want to be.

First, the main thing is simply getting the Author's URL link to be dofollow. To do this you need to open the comment-template.php file in your /wp-includes/ folder. Find this section of code at around line

[php num=40]
function get_comment_author_link() {
global $comment;
$url = get_comment_author_url();
$author = get_comment_author();

if ( empty( $url ) || 'http://' == $url )
$return = $author;
else
$return = "$author";
return apply_filters('get_comment_author_link', $return);
}
[/php]

Now just delete the nofollow at around line 48 (on 48 in the example here) so it looks like this.

[php num=48]
$return = "$author";
[/php]

At this point your blog is technically a dofollow blog because you follow the Authors URL in comments. The next two steps are optional, and it's up to you to implement them or not.

The second step as I see it, because the third step is just a lot more common with people seeking to abuse your hospitality. This step will cause any URLs typed into the comments to be followed links as well.

You need to open your formatting.php file in your /wp-includes/ folder, and find this section of code at around line 617.

[php num=617]
function make_clickable($ret) {
$ret = ' ' . $ret;
// in testing, using arrays here was found to be faster
$ret = preg_replace(
array(
'#([\s>])([\w]+?://[\w\#$%&~/.\-;:=,?@\[\]+]*)#is',
'#([\s>])((www|ftp)\.[\w\#$%&~/.\-;:=,?@\[\]+]*)#is',
'#([\s>])([a-z0-9\-_.]+)@([^,< \n\r]+)#i'),
array(
'$1$2',
'$1$2',
'$1$2@$3'),$ret);
// this one is not in an array because we need it to run last, for cleanup of accidental links within links
$ret = preg_replace("#(]+?>|>))]+?>([^>]+?)#i", "$1$3", $ret);
$ret = trim($ret);
return $ret;
}
[/php]

On lines 626 and 627 delete the rel="nofollow" from each lin so they look like this.

[php num=626]
'$1$2',
'$1$2',
[/php]

now when someone types in a URL it should be clickable and it should be followable.

This last step is probably the one you should think longest about. If some one is trying to really spam you they will most often use actual hyperlinks like these. So wether you allow these to follow or not is a bigger decision. Personally, i believe they spammers will spam anyways, so I would make the modification and have these dofollowed.

Open your default-filters.php file in your /wp-includes/ folder and locate this section of code.

[php num=15]
// Comments, trackbacks, pingbacks
add_filter('pre_comment_author_name', 'strip_tags');
add_filter('pre_comment_author_name', 'trim');
add_filter('pre_comment_author_name', 'wp_specialchars', 30);

add_filter('pre_comment_author_email', 'trim');
add_filter('pre_comment_author_email', 'sanitize_email');

add_filter('pre_comment_author_url', 'strip_tags');
add_filter('pre_comment_author_url', 'trim');
add_filter('pre_comment_author_url', 'clean_url');

add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'wp_rel_nofollow', 15);
add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'balanceTags', 30);
[/php]

On line 27 (the line that contains 'wp_rel_nofollow' insert two slashes ( // ) at the beginning of the line to comment this line out so it looks like this.

[php num=27]
//add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'wp_rel_nofollow', 15);
[/php]

And that's it. Now actual hyper links will be dofollow too.

If you have any problems implementing this change be sure to let me know. Happy blogging and happy dofollowing.