One of the many things on my to do list was to get the do follow tag working on my side bar and the do follow for my Recent comments.

There are Do Follow plug-ins that do this. Tons actually. For instance Semiologic has one Dofollow

But being that my geek was over re-installing Windows XP on my laptop I thought I would get him to do the hack. Gotta love geeks!! everyone should have one. Turns out it really isnt all that difficult and it saved me and hopefully you hours trying to figure it out.

I screen shotted my way through this. Why Don’t I do a step by step How to Hack your wordpress core files to allow Do Follow of you comments.

First off why one earth would you even want to do this: Comments are the life blood of your blog, well in most part they are. Who on earth is going to comment on your blog these days when you just no-follow them. See what I am getting at!!

So here is what you’re going to do. Go to your C-panel or what ever it is you use. And look for this. wp-includes.

Then go find the comment-template.php

single click on it and look to the top right of your browser window. See this image

click that to edit the file. Once you’ve got that opened in your browser you’ll see abunch of mumbo jumbo code.

dont worry just do a search for the term follow. To do that click on Edit in your browser and select “find in this page”

Then you should be looking at this:

Simply change the “no” in nofollow to dofollow

save your changes and that’s done !!!

Check your blog to see if it has worked. (of course) click on the SEO for firefox icon on the bottom of your browser window toolbar.

So we know it is working. Phew always freaks me out when I am doing stuff like that. I’m notorious for breaking things and having to go about fixing them. This is safe don’t worry !!

So now we go about doing the same thing for the sidebar to get wordpress to display dofollow for the items on your side bar.

Again this next piece of information is in your wp-includes folder.

in this folder you’re looking for a file called default-filters.php

As in the above example where you edited the comments-template.php. Simply click on the file icon and find this on the top right of your browser window.

And again you’ll be faced with a bunch of mumbo jumbo code.

Again as in above just do a search for the term follow. Because that is what you’re going to want to change. So your side bar will not have the rel=nofollow tag everything in your side bar.

So after having done that you’re going to looking at this:

now according to my geek. Did I mention everyone should have their own geek?, yeah you really should. You have to add some // of those not sure what he called them, some techy term and the reason for it. Hey I’m not tech savvy so it went right over my head, I just want the results.

So it will look like this.

click save and you’re all done.

Then prove that it works. Again with SEO for firefox on

Notice that the links aren’t blocked out in red as they would be were you to have the rel=nofollow tag still active in your side bar.

And there you have it wordpress hacked to remove the nofollow tags. all in a few and easy steps.