diff --git a/scrapy/utils/misc.py b/scrapy/utils/misc.py
index 5c986eedc..51cef1e91 100644
--- a/scrapy/utils/misc.py
+++ b/scrapy/utils/misc.py
@@ -138,7 +138,7 @@ def md5sum(file):
 
 def rel_has_nofollow(rel):
     """Return True if link rel attribute has nofollow type"""
-    return rel is not None and 'nofollow' in rel.split()
+    return rel is not None and 'nofollow' in rel.replace(',', ' ').split()
 
 
 def create_instance(objcls, settings, crawler, *args, **kwargs):