Remove Hyperlinks in Comments is a very simple plugin that prevents Wordpress from automatically creating hyperlinks in the comments section.
A few months ago Google decided to change their policy on nofollow and partly because of this I decided to remove the ability to add your website when commenting on one of my sites. Unfortunately most of my visitors decided to get around this simply by adding their site in the end of the comment. I personally have nothing against this but since the default behaviour by Wordpress (as of version 2.8) is to automatically create a hyperlink from links in comments I was back on square one again.
Since I could not find a simple method to deactivate this I ended up creating this plugin which will unlink all links in the comments section. Feel free to share your thoughts and feedback with a comment below.
Download
You can download Remove Links in Comments from Wordpress.
Installation
- Unzip, upload the folder to your WordPress plugin directory.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- You’re done!
Changelog
1.0
- First public release (30/11/2009)
Donations
If you like this plugin, feel free to donate a link to this post or blog.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
you could set it to not automatically approve if there are a certain number of links (Settings >> Discussion >> Comment Moderation). I have set mine to 1 link.
I don’t mind links as long as they are related to the post.
This is a common problem in Sweden, they are rarely related to the post.
Yep, it might help preventing spam links. But why don’t you use Disqus since people now like it and all links appear are generated by javascript to there’s no worry about PR juice.
This looks like an interesting plugin i will give it a try.
I’m glad to hear. Feel free to get back with your feedback.
Stefan, do you mean that you have a lot of people leaving links in their comments. I haven’t come across that problem yet. I don’t mind a link if it’s relevant, but if it isn’t I’ll just delete the comment.
This is a common problem in Sweden. For some time now most of the Swedish blogs are about fashion and the big blogs within this topic do not have a input for your URL and therefore people started to add the link in their comment (copy-paste). Later on this has spread and now almost all the girls within the age of 0-18 add a link to their site at the end of their comment.
Well, all I can say is I hope it doesn’t spread because it it does I will have to change my comment policy
If there are no links for people to comment on then how are they going to boost their page rank?
This is the problem i have is that people make their blog nofollow because they dont want spammers. But they have to understand that us smaller guys dont have a huge budget to buy pr8 backlinks.
Blog comments is not a good method to get backlinks and you should forget all about pagerank since it’s almost useless when it comes to ranking on search engines.