Why you should Nofollow your blog comments

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.

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 🙂

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.

Crying shame really

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

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.

What’s that all about? ;^)

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

“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.

@ 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!

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

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

dofollowblogs.net – scheeszh!

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..

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?

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 …

@ 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

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

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.

From a fairly newbie perspective on the whole matter, I think nofollow blog comments are the way to go.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

NOFOLLOWING your comment links is VERY egoistical., and to be honest, the impression you create as webmaster “recommending” nofollow on your blog is a bad and very egoistical one.

Obviously, your site’s “status” is more important than you…its like a spit in the face to everyone commenting on your blog. Mind you that a huge part of YOUR site’s comment is actually coming from other people. You are profiting from them!

Instead of doing this better use anti-spam plugins, like we dont have enough means to prevent spam! Akismet doesn’t even let legit trackbacks through anymore..just as an example.

Why on earth forcing nofollow?

yeah i see you are WAY off, you are so paranoid of your site rank and PR that you even disabled any links in your comments. Utterly ridiculous.

Keep bowing down to Google 😉

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

Why you should Nofollow your blog comments

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