Originally, the nofollow rule was implemented to deter spammers. And, as many predicted, it really didn’t work. Spam is still an epidemic.

Then nofollow evolved into a way for webmasters to link to questionable material without being penalized by Google.

John Scott makes a pretty good case for removing the nofollow attribute altogether:

… Just don’t link to crap in the first place.

If you link to crap, nofollow or not, you deserve whatever Google dishes out.

If you’re accountable for the comments on your blog, why not remove the nofollow attribute? The people who comment on your blog are helping you build content and readership.

(As an aside, the nofollow attribute has already been stripped from the comments here. See the comment policy for more information.)

If you feel the link in their comments does not coincide with your readership or is considered a bad neighborhood - remove it before approving the comment.

So, you’ve decided that you’d like to remove the nofollow attribute, but you’re using WordPress 2.0.x and the previous plugins no longer work - no problem.

There is the manual way of removing the nofollow tag using Find/Replace; remove all instances of “nofollow” from the WordPress core files. But, editing core WordPress files is never the ideal solution.

Always go the route of less work in the event of an upgrade.

As an alternative, the SEM DoFollow plugin still works with WordPress 2.0.x and there is also another DoFollow plugin with a few additional features.

(I’m pretty sure the latter plugin is a complete rewrite of the original No NoFollow plugin for WP 1.5.x by Christoph Rummel )

If you know of any additional nofollow removal plugins for WP 2.0.x, please send me a quick note and I’ll list it here.