How to Change Your Comment Links in Blogger to DoFollow

There is always much talk about nofollow and dofollow links on web sites. Much of the discussion is about whether you should make a link nofollow. For blogs, this discussion is centered more around the links in the comments of a blog post. Many visitors may leave a comment in an effort to get a free link back to their blog with a dofollow comment link.

In WordPress you have plugins that can control whether a link in the comments is nofollow or dofollow. In Blogger blogs, however, the default is to use nofollow links in the comments of the posts. In this post I will explain how to change the comment links in a Blogger blog to dofollow, if you would like to make the change.

Removing NoFollow

There are two links in the comments of a Blogger post that default to nofollow: the backlinks, and the comment author’s link. You can change one or both, it is up to you. Both are changed in the same manner, just in different locations.

To change the links, use the following steps:

1. Log in to Blogger, and then from the Dashboard click on the Layout link of the blog you want to change.
2. In the top menu, click on the Edit HTML link to display the HTML for your template.
3. We will need to view all the code in the template, so check the Expand Widget Templates checkbox.
4. Now you have two links that you can change:
   1. For backlinks, search for a expr:href=’data:backlink.url’.
   2. For the comment author’s web site, search for a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’.

In both of the above cases, your cursor will move to the link tag that contains the nofollow value.

5. Delete the value rel=’nofollow’ from the link tag for the link you searched for. This will now make the link a dofollow link.
6. Click the Save Template button to save your changes. Now when visitors leave comments, they will receive a dofollow link back to their site.

I currently use the NoFollow Free plugin that allows me to change an author’s link after the author has made a specific number of comments on Technically Easy. The number of comments is 3, so after three comments you get a dofollow link back to your site.