I am seriously thinking about using a plugin I found today called Dofollow Trackbacks that allows you to keep comment URLs as nofollow, but allow any trackbacks or pingbacks to actually be dofollow.
My guess is, this will encourage people to actually link to sites more if they know they will also get a link back in return. Seems like a good idea and I thought I would try out the implementation first. Here goes. The first site I am going to add it to is one of my main sites called The Electron Plumber which is mostly an internet scam busting and virus reporting site.
It’s been getting a good deal of traffic lately and a decent number of links, but hopefully putting a plugin like this on it will encourage more links. I’ll post back here in a couple of weeks and let you know how it works.
UPDATE: The plugin works exactly as advertised using Wordpress 2.8.5 and the Thesis theme. I just received the pingback from here to the Electron Plumber and it is a dofollow link while manually entered comment URLs are still nofollow. Rock on!
Enjoy!