Every avid blogger out there has been waiting for this day and it is finally here, the release of WordPress 3.0 aka Thelonious.

Like announced on the official WordPress blog, arm your Vuvuzelas and go and download WordPress 3.0 or alternatively you can upgrade it through your WordPress dashboard.

It took half a year of work by over 200 contributers to get WordPress 3.0 ready for release and what a release this is.

Some of the new major features included in the release of WordPress 3.0 is a brand new default theme called Twenty Ten, there is also brand new APIs available to theme developers that will allow them with more customisation options with regards to backgrounds, menus, headers, short links, post types and taxonomies.

No need to install a separate WordPress installation anymore to make use of a Multi User blog interface, the new WordPress 3.0 incorporates single and MU blogs from just one WordPress installation.

For more information about the release of WordPress 3.0 check out the official WordPress blog.

Today I started thinking about how I could encourage more people to leave comments on my blog and in turn give something back, and came up with the brilliant plan of removing nofollow from the comments links.

NoFollow is a relationship property that gets set by the blogging software on all links that is contained with in comments, if a search engine finds a nofollow relationship it simply ignores the link and thus not give links back to the sites of the people commenting. Backlinks are a great way to improve your search engine rankings but its always difficult to get your links out there on other sites.

I am for sure no SEO guru but I know the basics and enough to realise how much a backlink is worth, thus have I came up with this plan. Every time someone now comments on my posts and fill in their website URL I will remove the nofollow from the link and ensure a backlink to their site. This hopefully would encourage people to leave more comments and get something back for partaking in my site.

I believe if you give you shall receive. I wrote a small WordPress plugin to disable nofollow links on your comments, please note that it only removes the comments from the author website link, nofollow is still added to links inside the comment. Download my plugin called DoFollow here. Just upload to your plugins directory and activate.

Remember to leave a comment to get your backlink.