Why you should Nofollow your blog comments

20.05.08

ok I’m all for free enterprise blah blah whatever turns you on, but I think sometimes people just need to be warned that :

a) Blog comments can lose all trust

b) If you don’t fix you comments your Posts will lose trust

c) Then you get all angry at Google, which will only make it worse.

so why should you NoFollow your comments.

www.commenthunt.com

Get 500 targeted blog comments with CommentHunt.com’s Blog Commenting Service for only $83.99. Blog Comments help your website rank well in SERPS and send more spiders and traffic to your website.

www.dofollowblogs.net

480 PR0 - PR5 backlinks Plus you get these 424 backlinks FREE for only $49.99

www.dofollowblogs.com, www.blogsthatfollow.com, www.dofollowblog.info

They don’t offer a paided service to game Google but I bet some others in say India do

and of course there is the d-list still kicking around, but when you look at some of the people that where on the d-list I think you will find that they have switched the NoFollow back.. hmm wonder why ?

DaveN

added : People that disagree http://ez-onlinemoney.com/blog/uncategorized/why-you-shouldnt-nofollow-your-blog-comments/

http://andybeard.eu/2008/05/why-you-should-nofollow-your-blog-comments.html 

31 Comments

  • 1

    My blog has never been inundated with comments,

    however when I turned the nofollow off on comments I started receiving a high number of low quality comments which added no value at all to the post, many of which from the same IP’s - It attracted the wrong type of commenters.

    I subsequently added the nofollow back to all comments.

    I was just trying to reward readers who added an element of discussion to the blog with a link back.

    I don’t think blog comments should be nofollowed, but at the moment its the only way.

    Paul
    http://www.b10g.co.uk/blog

    20th May 2008 @ 13:21

  • 2

    [...] Dave Naylor seems to think it is a good idea to nofollow blog comments. [...]

    Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? | Andy Beard - Niche Marketing

    20th May 2008 @ 14:33

  • 3

    As long as the referal or author links in the most recently comments, top commenters or top comments plugins on the blog homepage are not nofollowed :)

    Loren

    20th May 2008 @ 14:34

  • 4

    Wow, I didn’t know those sites existed. I guess that is one way to make a buck.

    dofollowblogs.net - that one cracks me up! Funny that it only has a PR3.

    Dave Dugdale
    http://www.rentvine.com/

    20th May 2008 @ 15:16

  • 5

    Crying shame really

    AlchemyV
    http://alchemyv.com/blog/?cat=29

    20th May 2008 @ 15:16

  • 6

    [...] post is in reply to a post made by David Naylor, who more or less says that you should nofollow your blog comments because it invites spam, which in turn causes your readers to lose trust in [...]

    Why you Should’NT Nofollow your blog comments

    20th May 2008 @ 15:59

  • 7

    Any solid proof of points A & B? Andy Beard seems to have some valid arguments against this…

    Mark B
    http://www.markbarrera.com

    20th May 2008 @ 16:56

  • 8

    Paul, your first post on your blog was… April 23rd 2008 - what do you expect? You just need to implement effective spam controls.

    Dave I am not suggesting it is right to remove nofollow in all circumstances. A corporate blog which is doing little more than posting press releases would be a good example of a blog that probably shouldn’t remove nofollow, and might even consider not having comments at all.

    Seth Godin for instance has a blog with no comments, though he does show trackbacks.

    I have blogs using WP as a CMS with no comments.

    I also have blogs which are dofollow that just site there, and hardly get any comments at all, they rarely receive any spam either, even though one of them was a PR5 for some time.

    There are people who have written that Google is giving penalties specifically to Dofollow blogs.
    My point was to offer some proof, though not conclusive proof that that wasn’t the case.

    Directly comparing the 2 domains was actually a good opportunity I have been looking for since Google upped me to a more “in the line of fire” PR6, I was always fairly sure I had a -3 penalty not -2 on the green fairy dust.

    If anything dofollow might even mitigate potential penalties if it is percentage based. I have so many links to reliable readers that any future dead link is just a drop in the ocean.
    Compare that to a site with very few outgoing links, but has a few that now redirect to Russian porn sites - I know a few high profile sites with that problem, and have even emailed the SEOs handling the sites when I spotted it.

    I don’t allow links to generated sites, BANS etc, which are the most likely to become dead domains.

    Some of the worst offenders are employees of people we both know, even speakers at SMX - I caught one the other day linking to a client site from a comment.

    Andy Beard
    http://andybeard.eu/

    20th May 2008 @ 19:32

  • 9

    What’s that all about? ;^)

    I have remove Nofollow!

    21st May 2008 @ 01:05

  • 10

    [...] Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? [...]

    Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments | Hobo SEO UK

    21st May 2008 @ 01:35

  • 11

    In the end you have to make the decisions. Most of the webmasters whenever they write a blog it is for the sake of building conversation and to be more personally involved with the readers too .. and at times even when you want to do for all those readers who are reading your blog and making your blog a Success, you still can’t do it.

    Though I think there should be more effective tools which would allow particular reader to get the “Do Follow” benefit and the rest who are either not so frequent or just not adding worth to the post should be “no follow”

    This sort of tool or plugin will present a “win win” situation for the webmaster and the readers …

    Mark
    Editor
    http://www.212articles.com

    Mark
    http://www.212articles.com

    21st May 2008 @ 05:49

  • 12

    “Some of the worst offenders are employees of people we both know, even speakers at SMX - I caught one the other day linking to a client site from a comment.”

    lol

    I slapped the condom back on as I don’t have the time to closely monitor, I think if you monitor you will probably ok, but how do protect being 301′d

    You could easily switch after planting a lot of dofollow comments to the “good” site and then switch to the “evil” site.

    Not sure what the results are from this as I have not tested.

    Evil Linkbaiter
    http://www.cornwallseo.com/search/

    21st May 2008 @ 06:57

  • 13

    @ Andy Beard

    Andy, the blog had been going for just under a year when we had some major database issues which lead to the loss of all posts, because of this I wanted to start afresh, partly laziness and partly wanted to take the blog into a new direction.

    Thats why the first post would have been 23rd April.

    In my comment I was referring to about 5 months ago when I tried this - should have mentioned it really in my comment!

    Paul
    http://www.b10g.co.uk/blog

    21st May 2008 @ 09:25

  • 14

    [...] Why you should Nofollow your blog comments - Dave Naylor [...]

    To Follow or not to Follow Blog Comments, That is the question | UK SEO/SEM Blog | B10G

    21st May 2008 @ 09:55

  • 15

    How about forums? Should forums that allow sigs be “no followed” as well?

    sem4u

    22nd May 2008 @ 10:17

  • 16

    [...] Dave Naylor seems to think it is a good idea to nofollow blog comments. [...]

    Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? | Blogging For Backlinks

    22nd May 2008 @ 10:41

  • 17

    We just added a blog to our site and I am really glad I read this post.

    dofollowblogs.net - scheeszh!

    David B.
    http://www.comfortableshoes.com/blog

    23rd May 2008 @ 00:44

  • 18

    I definitely agree with you that you should not have ANY spammy comments on your blog, but IMO that doesn’t mean you have to nofollow. Or maybe you do.. I don’t know.

    I got the do-follow plugin for my blog in order to encourage discussion and reward people with some link juice. I do get hit with A LOT of comment spam, but it is very obvious which comments are spam and which are not, takes an extra 5 minutes to delete em and move on. When my blog gets a lot more readers/comments I may have to switch back, but for now I don’t mind at all..

    Fred
    http://www.justfredworks.com

    23rd May 2008 @ 04:33

  • 19

    It’s been a while since I’ve been here Dave but anyway I would rather a system with a live comment threshold for dofollow so the trusted and active members of the community get some link love at a certain point. Someone smart could build a plugin for this and then everyone would be happy. This is a workable solution yeah?

    Fireblade
    http://www.fireblades.org

    23rd May 2008 @ 05:09

  • 20

    [...] Naylor lists a couple of very good reasons why you should nofollow your blog comments… namely, services that offer hundreds of "targeted" blog comments on do-follow [...]

    Guest Blogger Thursday: Roundup for the Week of 5/18/08 | Google Mega Cash

    23rd May 2008 @ 21:01

  • 21

    [...] tag op je blog (vooral bij de reacties) te deactiveren. Dave Naylor haalt echter enkele redenen aan om wel een nofollow op de links in de reacties te plaatsen. Als je dagelijks honderden comments krijgt kan ik me voorstellen dat het een [...]

    Waardevolle SEO & Internet Marketing artikels - week 25/05/2008

    24th May 2008 @ 12:29

  • 22

    [...] something that Andy Beard points out on his site. In a recent post on his blog, he responded to a previous post by Doug Naylor, using many of the same keywords. Though Beard’s post both came later and linked to [...]

    Spam Bloggers Who Backdate - PlagiarismToday

    27th May 2008 @ 15:07

  • 23

    We opened some blogs in the last weeks, and it took just one or 2 days until the first spam posts came in.
    Real bad spam, even if the blogs are nofollow.
    There are some programmes around which do this - automated - day & night, only unloading shxx.

    I have one blog which is dofollow, but in German language. This remained pretty clean up to now. English keywords didn´t fit I guess …

    Andy
    http://www.dermal.de

    9th June 2008 @ 12:11

  • 24

    [...] posts (see what I did there) about blog comments and specifically whether or not you should nofollow blog comments in an attempt to build a site that Google trusts and therefore allows to rank for competitive [...]

    The Seo Community » Blog Archive » Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments?

    13th July 2008 @ 06:03

  • 25

    @ anyone who knows

    I’ve heard about people talking about -2 or -20 penalties from Google.

    Can anyone enlighten me to exactly what they are? Or how you find if you’ve got one?

    Or are they an abstract figure of speech type thing?

    cheers

    Irish gift ideas
    http://www.traditionalirishgifts.com

    14th August 2008 @ 15:27

  • 26

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    BataFlaph
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    10th September 2008 @ 20:18

  • 27

    [...] didn’t take long for the blogosphere to react. Dave Naylor’s post is perhaps the most known example and extremely spot on while we are at it. Andy Beard of course [...]

    Gray Hat Zone » The Demise of the No Nofollow Movement

    17th September 2008 @ 12:25

  • 28

    Agreed. Thankfully most wp themes are nofollow by default due to google’s attempt to sort out blog spam.

    Guinness Gifts
    http://www.celticbydesign.com

    18th October 2008 @ 18:16

  • 29

    [...] Why should you add NO FOLLOW to your blog comments? [...]

    DOfollow and NOfollow - what and why they aren’t just for wordpress blogs | Kelly's MyQute Fairy-Angel Lifestreaming Bloggie

    21st November 2008 @ 02:49

  • 30

    [...] Why should you add NO FOLLOW to your blog comments? [...]

    DOfollow and NOfollow - what and why they aren’t just for wordpress blogs | Kelly's MyQute Fairy-Angel Lifestreaming Bloggie

    21st November 2008 @ 02:49

  • 31

    The worst part of having a DoFollow blog is having to waste time moderating comments. You can never be sure if that comment was “outsourced” or not, because these days, it’s NOT just coming from India. And outsourced comments are the bane of all comments.

    There is a very popular tech blog that STRIPS out ALL the URLs of commentators, and that does not stop it from getting 1000,000 visitors a month, and people STILL comment like CRAZY on that blog.

    I’ll leave it to you to figure out which blog it is…no, it’s not mine :-)

    No Follow and Do Follow……that blog I mention is neither!

    And YET it gets loads and loads of comments on every single post. Even (more popular) NoFollow blogs don’t get so many comments……….

    Now that is a paradox.

    Modern Street
    http://www.modernstreet.com

    12th May 2009 @ 07:28

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