Write Back Nofollow
In an effort to deter unwanted commenting on your site, Vine Type, by default, adds additional rel="nofollow" attributes to links added by your comment commenters.
How to Activate Nofollow
The Vine Type content management system does this automatically with no effort required by you. If you'd like to learn more about this feature continue reading.
How Nofollow Works
This additional information that the Vine Type content management system adds to comment links is invisible to humans and causes no side-effects to the readability or usefulness to people who visit your site.
The extra information, however, is detected by Google and other internet search engines. The extra information does not prevent anyone from placing links on your site, but it does take away much of the incentive for doing so for unethical reasons. Allow me to expand on that thought.
Why Do Folks Put Those Links on Websites?
Why would unethical folks on the internet want to add links from your site to their site? The answer is clear: internet search engines such as Google rank sites higher if the search engines detect many sites linking to a central location.
This makes sense. Suppose your site is all about your pet parakeet, and you link to a particular parakeet site that provides great information on the care and feeding of parakeets -- and many other parakeet owners also link to that informative site. The search engines detect many links about parakeets pointing to a central "hub" of information. That informative site is pushed up towards the top of search results when internet visitors search for parakeet-related items.
Now, back to the ne'er-do-wells. They desire to put links from your site (and many other sites) to their site to boost their search engine rankings. They don't care about you or your visitors, they just want links to boost their own rankings when folks are searching for...well, we won't describe the items they sell.
Nofollow Removes the Spam Incentive
By placing the invisible rel="nofollow" attributes in links, your Vine Type site tells Google and the other search engines "Don't follow this link. Don't boost the rankings of the site it points to."
So in this way Vine Type takes away the incentive for placing bogus links on your site. Since the search engines are going to ignore off-site links, the ne'er-do-wells would not help their cause by even trying.
Keep in mind, however, that there is no effect to you or your visitors. Both can provide links and you and your visitors can click through to the information the links your visitors place within their write back comments.
The Vine Type content management system also deters mechanical means of placing links on your site via comment spam deterrence feature.