SEO Update

Get Rid Of HTML Links In Comments

The problem.
Bloggers are always looking to promote their blogs, and spammers are everywhere. One thing that totally annoys me on my blogs is the incredible amount of links left in comments, which are usually irrelevant. By default, WordPress transforms URLs in comments to links. Thankfully, if you’re as tired of comment links as I am, this can be overwritten.

The solution.
Simply open your function.php file and paste in this code:

function plc_comment_post( $incoming_comment ) {
	$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = htmlspecialchars($incoming_comment['comment_content']);
	$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = str_replace( "'", ''', $incoming_comment['comment_content'] );
	return( $incoming_comment );
}
 
function plc_comment_display( $comment_to_display ) {
	$comment_to_display = str_replace( ''', "'", $comment_to_display );
	return $comment_to_display;
}
 
add_filter('preprocess_comment', 'plc_comment_post', '', 1);
add_filter('comment_text', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1);
add_filter('comment_text_rss', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1);
add_filter('comment_excerpt', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1);

function plc_comment_post( $incoming_comment ) {
	$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = htmlspecialchars($incoming_comment['comment_content']);
	$incoming_comment['comment_content'] = str_replace( "'", ''', $incoming_comment['comment_content'] );
	return( $incoming_comment );
}

function plc_comment_display( $comment_to_display ) {
	$comment_to_display = str_replace( ''', "'", $comment_to_display );
	return $comment_to_display;
}

add_filter('preprocess_comment', 'plc_comment_post', '', 1);
add_filter('comment_text', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1);
add_filter('comment_text_rss', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1);
add_filter('comment_excerpt', 'plc_comment_display', '', 1);

Once you have saved the file, say goodbye to links and other undesirable HTML in your comments.

Code explanation.
The first thing we did was create two functions that replace HTML characters with HTML entities. Then, using the powerful add_filter() WordPress function, we hooked the standard WordPress comments processing functions to the two functions we just created. This makes sure that any comments added will have their HTML filtered out.