Comment for Humans

Comment for Humans is my next step in the no-follow argument.

There is a running debate about no-follow. Some will have you believe that following is a good thing that rewards commenters for taking part by passing on some Google juice, others that this encourages spammers and so no-follow should remain. I take a different view.

Comments are, or should be, intended for humans and the link that comes with it should be provided for humans to follow up on a person if they find the comment to be particularly interesting.

I believe that to argue that providing a link that search engines can take account of is rewarding commenters significantly devalues the interaction between blogger and commenter. If taking part in the conversation isn’t reward enough then don’t take part.

If that weren’t enough, I am concerned that search engines might increase a site’s position in the results based on the fact that a person has left loads of comments (good, bad, trolly, or otherwise) on other blogs, and I think this is wrong. The fact that I leave lots of comments should be irrelevent in deciding how important my website is in a particular search.

All of this means that I want to remove any search engine influence from comments and commenters.

Comment for Humans overides the comment_author_link() template tag, replacing the HTML link with the commenters name and url as plain text. It then uses javascript to place the link back in the site so that real people can still click on it.