How to automatically remove the Nofollow from your posts

How to automatically remove the Nofollow from your posts

By default, WordPress automatically converts all links from the post content to nofollow. If you prefer your links to be dofollow, just read and use the following recipe.

Copy the following code, and paste it on the functions.php file from your theme. Once you saved the file file, the rel="nofollow" attributes will be removed.

function remove_nofollow($string) {
	$string = str_ireplace(' rel="nofollow"', '', $string);
	return $string;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'remove_nofollow');

Thanks to Jeff Starr for this awesome piece of code. Have you checked out the book Jeff wrote with Chris Coyier? It's called Digging into WordPress and it is great!

14 Responses

Indrek

Feb 03 2010 10:52

And it’s actually that easy
WP should have a variable you could change in the config whether to use nofollow’s or not.

Andrew Jones

Feb 03 2010 15:02

I had a quick look on my WordPress install and didn’t see any nofollow links.
Maybe its because I am still on 2.8?

Peter Stuifzand

Feb 03 2010 15:29

Will this remove text from your post that writes about nofollow, like the code in your post?

DazzlinDonna

Feb 03 2010 17:08

Pretty sure this statement is untrue: “By default, WordPress automatically converts all links from the post content to nofollow”.

Comments, yes. Posts, no. Perhaps you’re using a plugin that makes your post links nofollow, but default WP doesn’t do that.

Nimit Kashyap

Feb 03 2010 17:18

Useful post.

Slobodan Kustrimovic

Feb 03 2010 18:27

@Peter – I believe it will Maybe it’s better to use some fancy regex for this.

Jeff Starr

Feb 03 2010 21:39

@Andrew: WordPress automatically adds “nofollow” attributes to comment links and comment-author links, but does not add them to post content. To remove nofollow from comments, add this line of code to the function:

add_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘remove_nofollow’);

@Peter: this code will remove only the actual “nofollow” attribute from the (X)HTML source code output, so no changes made to any other content. Plus, as a filter, the function does not change anything in the database. More information at: http://digwp.com/2010/02/remove-nofollow-attributes-from-post-content/

Peter Stuifzand

Feb 03 2010 21:56

@Jeff The problem I thought this code could have, is mentioned in the blog post you mentioned in your comment.

It says: “Note that if you have some posts about nofollow, this function will remove rel=”nofollow” from your code examples as well.”

Jeff Starr

Feb 03 2010 22:07

Ah yes, good catch. Not recommended if you’re blogging about nofollow stuff.