id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc
10550	nofollow attribute added to comment_reply_link function	seo-dave		"Wasn't sure if to list this as a defect or enhancement, it's a defect IMHO.

Within wp-includes/comment-template.php there are nofollow attributes added to the ""reply to comment"" links.

For search engine ranking reasons this is not a good idea. Since I've had trouble explaining this to non-SEO's (I'm a search engine optimization consultant) I'll explain the problem in detail also see http://wordpress.org/support/topic/287704?replies=1 and http://codex.wordpress.org/Talk:Template_Tags/comment_reply_link. 

The original use of nofollow was to stop PR/link benefit passing through a link in effect saving the PR/link benefit. For WordPress that meant you could by default add nofollow links to commenter's links and to some degree protect WordPress blog owners from link comment spammers.

Google has recently reported http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ that they now treat nofollow links differently, rather than protecting the PR/link benefit of a nofollow link, they delete the PR/link benefit!

What this means to the average WordPress blog owner is a LOT of PR/link benefit is lost through nofollow links and a lot of this could be through the relatively new reply to comment links.

If you have a highly commented site and have WordPress set to have  50 comments per page, that's 50 reply to comment links with nofollow added. Since Google now deletes the PR/link benefit that would normally go through those links (if it lacked nofollow) a page/site could easily loose over half it's PR/link benefit just because of implementing the reply to comment links!

For those who don't understand PR/link benefit: PR/link benefit is shared equally through all links (internal and external) from a page, so if there are in total 100 links on a page and 50 are nofollow, 50% of the PR/link benefit from that page will now be deleted by Google, it used to go to the non nofollow links!

In a perfect world we'd no longer use nofollow anywhere, unfortunately I don't have an easy to implement solution for this problem regarding commenter's links, but there is one for the nofollow attribute on the reply to comment links and that is remove the nofollow attribute or at least make it easier to remove at theme level (I understand there's a way, but I couldn't find it/figure it out).

David Law"	defect (bug)	closed	normal	3.1	Comments		minor	fixed	needs-patch	joliss42@…