How To Add NoFollow To Intense Debate Comments

Intense Debate is one of the most powerful comment management systems around. It is designed to give your blog’s comment section more versatility and give your readers more ways to connect with your blog and share their comment. I have been using Intense Debate on a few of my blogs (it’s coming to this blog too!). But I realized early on that the comment links are not nofollow. That could be problematic, especially when dealing with spammers. Regardless of what the so-called “gurus” say, I’d rather not link to a site that talks about pills, drugs, and thinks like that.

Adding no-follow attribute to Intense Debate involves two steps. First, you need to disable “Parse Links” feature on Intense Debate. You can find the option in Comments page on Intense debate.

The second option is by using jQuery to add no-follow attribute to your links. Thaya Kareeson has written a killer piece on how to nofollow links using Javascript. I have simply changed the code to make it work for Intense Debate (download the file here). My goal was to nofollow all links in the comment section. Some bloggers do not like that approach. I personally prefer to do-follow links to sites that are not spammy (and to reward those who take time to comment on my blogs).

Below is the code that you’ll need (if you have not downloaded the above file). Just put it in a Javascript file and upload it to your server:

The first line adds nofollow attribute to all links in your comment section, including the avatar links. The second line takes care of the rest.

You are not done. You still have to reference the above file in your site’s template. Add the following line somewhere before the end of your footer (make sure the name of the file matches).

That’s it. You are done. You can now test your links either by hand or a SEO browser plugin to see if this is working. Intense Debate could add the no-follow option in the future. Until it does, you can use the above solution to protect your blog from linking to spammy sites (without no-follow attribute).