Invitation to comment: dofollow

no nofollow = dofollow (sort off)Last Friday Steven of Some Minor Issues asked how he could increase the number of comments on his blog. I jokingly replied he should install the NoFollow Free WordPress plugin. Jokingly, because common blogging-sense claims that nofollow prevents people that are just looking for pagerank from posting irrelevant comments on your blog(*).
But then I began to wonder; why should I be afraid of not having “nofollow”? WordPress has  great spam-detection (Akismet) and I don’t allow comments to be published automatically anyway. Why not give people who contribute some pagerank-juice in return? So yesterday I installed NoFollow Free and configured it to remove nofollow for commentators who have 2 or more published (i.e. relevant, approved by me) comments.
So that’s that, this now is a dofollow blog. Now let those comments start pooring in! 😉
(*) The ranking of your site in search-results depends amongst other things on the number of links to your URL. That implies that if you’re able to “seed” your own link in blog-comments, Google will like you more. To prevent this from happening, nofollow (which is a value of the “rel”-attribute of the “a”-tag) tells Google not to consider a link. If  Google ignores links in blog-comments, people who are only trying to get Google to like their site, will not bother with commenting any more. That’s why rel=”nofollow” has become default in WordPress (and other blog software) ages ago.

5 thoughts on “Invitation to comment: dofollow”

  1. I guess you’re right. It might be considered as a “reward” for your effort, and if you do a manual selection I don’t see why not!
    Let’s first see what happens here, I might follow you 😉

    Reply
    • well, i’m not exactly drowning in comments up until now, but that might be because google hasn’t picked up on this yet and because my pagerank isn’t that great either.. your mileage may vary.

      Reply
  2. I’ve been thinking about the exact same thing: dofollow will give your visitors an incentive to comment (or even pingback/traceback) thus increasing your perceived popularity and perhaps even adding to your content. Since the new Google rule (nofollow links are wasted PR to prevent link sculpting) there is no added value in nofollowing external links either. On the other hand, you might have to run a tighter spam filter.
    It’ll only help if your readers are blog owners/webmasters themselves as they know the value of a regular link.

    Reply

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