Why would anybody want to do what I have done and remove the nofollow from comment links? Surely it is there for safety? Worse still, why advertise the fact?
Well in reality, taking away the nofollow link from a site comment is not as daft as it sounds. Yes, it is opening up to all kinds of spam, but that is why we must check these comments manually.
What are the benefits to not nofollowing?
The immediately obvious advantages are to the people that are leaving comments. Suddenly they get two rewards to leaving comments on related posts.
First, any person else reading that post might read the comment and if they are interested, click on the link to go to their website. This in itself is a extraordinary boost and I have seen traffic arriving on my web-sites through these links.
But secondly, for the grounds that the nofollow is deleted, there is also a tiny search engine benefit. If there are not too many comments per page and the page has any sort of Page Rank, then that is being shared among those commenting. As long as all spam comments are manually deleted then the list of comments should represent just good, honest visitors.
Yes, some of these are commenting just for the sake of the link, but as long as the comment passes the manual checks, this is fine with me. If they add to the conversation, tell me how they happened upon the post or whatsoever then there is some positive rationale for their comment and I am happy to give them the advantage.
And this is where the advantage to the web site owner comes in. By making the comments more valuable to website owners whilst being particular as to which are accepted, suddenly more people are coming in excess of to the weblog, reading the posts and then making useful comments.
See the big advantage? More readers! And where do these readers come from? Well there are plenty of lists of "dofollow" websites to get included in. Once I have tidied this website a little, I'll ask a few visitors to add me to their do follow lists, then visitors looking to place relevant comments will find the website.
The disadvantages.
As my mum would say, every silver lining has a cloud!
Yes, there are some drawbacks. Get well known and the amount of spam comments arriving on the blog might be huge. But that is why you have to be firm and delete (before they are published / approved) every spam comment. Leave only those in place that are suitable, add to the post and are useful.
Close comments on older posts to prevent too a lot of spam bots getting hold of your web site and make sure that that Akismet is running to protect you from the worst of it all.
Is there a search engine risk?
Some visitors worry that having comments devoid of nofollow will diminish your own Page Rank. I do not deem that to be true. Why?
Well in my research the formula for inheriting Page Rank always looks at external and internal pages separately. It counts the number of external web-sites linked per page and shares the Page Rank there and possibly then does the same for internal pages.
Plus, if monitored and reviewed, then this is what search engines desire to see. Conversations taking place on a subject. So why punish this?
Feel free to browse the web site and leave a fitting comment on any post and if you also believe in nofollowing, let me know so I could visit your website!
Author Resource:-
By Keith Lunt, who offers website design in Formby. If you want to know more, call into the marketing blog, where you can leave a non-nofollowed link!
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://article2008.com/images/feed-icon.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://article2008.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites