Janric Website Design

Why would anyone 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 actually, removing the nofollow link from a blog 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 advantages to not nofollowing?
The immediately obvious advantages are to the people that are leaving comments. Suddenly they get two benefits to leaving comments on related posts.

First, anyone else reading that post might read the comment and if they are interested, click on the link to go to their blog. This in itself is a great boost and I have seen traffic arriving on my websites through these links.

But secondly, because the nofollow is removed, 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 amongst those commenting. As long as all spam comments are manually removed then the list of comments should represent just good, honest readers.

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 whatever then there is some positive reason for their comment and I am happy to give them the benefit.

And this is where the benefit to the site owner comes in. By making the comments more valuable to site owners whilst being particular as to which are accepted, suddenly more people are coming over to the blog, 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” blogs to get included in. Once I have tidied this site a little, I’ll ask a few such as Nickoo to add me to their Do Follow List. Then people looking to place relevant comments will find the site.

The disadvantages.
As my mum would say, every silver lining has a cloud!

Yes, there are some disadvantages. Get well known and the amount of spam comments arriving on the blog could be huge. But that is why you have to be strict 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 many spam bots getting hold of your site and make sure that Akismet is running to protect you from the worst of it all.

Is there a search engine risk?
Some people worry that having comments without nofollow will reduce your own Page Rank. I do not believe 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 sites linked per page and shares the Page Rank there and probably then does the same for internal pages.

Plus, if monitored and checked, then this is what search engines want to see. Conversations taking place on a topic. So why punish this?

Feel free to browse the site and leave a suitable comment on any post and if you also believe in nofollowing, let me know so I can visit your site!

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2. Methods To Making Comments To Generate More Traffic
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6. Beating The Comment Spammers
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