Why Would You Want To Remove NoFollow?
June 27, 2008 · Print This Article
Surely this will increase spam?
There is every chance that once you remove the nofollow attribute that this will attract those who are only looking for some quick link love. However, I’m of the opinion that it’s worth it if you have certain things in place.
My philospophy
My aim is to maintain or improve the quality of comments for you as a reader and reward genuine contribution.
I want to reward readers who actively participate and contribute on this blog. If someone is kind enough to take the time to leave a comment and contribute to the discussion I am more than happy for them to receive credit in the search engines as well as having a chance to generate traffic.
Everything in moderation
Whilst all of the above is true, I also recognise the need for balance and moderation. My blog is set up in such a way that every comment requires moderation before it appears and this has always been the case.
This gives me complete control over which comments I include, those that I moderate and those I choose to delete. I also have the Akismet plugin that catches most of the obvious spam comments.
I verify each link that is posted and if I feel it looks like spam I’ll either remove the link, comment or both. This is to protect you as a reader and also ensure this blog isn’t seen as a link farm when google crawls the site.
Comment’s like “nice post” usually won’t be added and anyone who posts keywords where their name should be also has their comment removed.
My own blog commenting strategy
I comment on both nofollow and dofollow blogs. If I’ve got something to say on a particular subject I don’t stop to think which category it falls under.
However, when I set out specifically to generate traffic by using blog commenting I set out with these intentions:
- Place my link on dofollow blogs
- Contribute something of value
- Read and Learn
- Look for potential JV partners
So although I set out to drive traffic that’s not where the process ends for me. Some people will simply try to post as many comments as possible. But they are missing a trick and that is learning from the site’s you visit and building relationships with the site owners.
I’m certainly not part of any “dofollow movement” this is simply something I’m testing and if this action affects the blog adversely then I won’t hesitate to change it back.
I read this post with interest since I have just started my blog. If the only reason to keep the NoFollow is to avoid Spam, it seems to me to be an excellent trade off for the opportunity to add validity to your comments. I, for one, would not ever bother to check out a link that posted obvious junk posts like “Nice post” even if you did let them through.
People that use comments solely for “link love” usually wind up shooting themselves in the foot.anyway. I much prefer to err on the side of the honest blog commenter.
Thanks Carol,
My main concern is quantity of spam comments that I may receive, the quality of the links posted aren’t too much of an issue since all my comments require moderation.
If you own a blog where you allow all comments there is the danger your site could end up full of junk links and that doesn’t look good as far as google is concerned.