Dofollow: Disabling “nofollow” on Moveable Type 3.3

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Since I was beating my head off this problem all weekend, I figured I’d post the solution for the benefit of anyone else who’s looking for it.

The Problem: Moveable Type (which I’m using for The Wizard of Duke Street) changes links so that they have the attribute ‘rel=”nofollow”‘. This is annoying, as when I post a link, or allow through a comment which has a link to the commenter’s site, I intend that link to be seen by search engines as a mark in favour of that site. Nofollow prevents that from happening - while the search engine spider sees the link, it won’t credit it in terms of the algorithm that calculates how popular a page is.

Solution Part 1: Disable the “nofollow” plugin in Moveable Type’s plugin page. This will allow links in the body of your post to function properly, and depending on how MT is configured on your server, may also work for links to commenters’ sites. If it doesn’t do the latter, though, leaving in a redirect function rather than a direct link, you’ll have to move on to part 2.

Solution Part 2: There’s an almost undocumented attribute which you can apply to the MTCommentAuthorLink tag, which you can do under Templates -> Archives -> Individual Entry Archive. Your tag should look something like:

<MTCommentAuthorLink no_redirect=”1″>

Rebuild your individual entry archives, and you’re done! Links should now have no nofollow “functionality” attached, and should go straight to the target sites, with no clumsy redirect.
Credits: I eventually found mention of the no_redirect attribute on Eat Drink Sleep Movable Type

Links: You can find more about how to disable nofollow on various blogging platforms on Andy Beard - Niche Marketing.