Give Out Some Link Love and Remove NoFollow
When people leave a comment on your blog (or generate a trackback by linking to a blog post), your blogging software is most likely adding the “nofollow” microformat extension. The result is that search engines like Google don’t follow those links off your site, and therefore the sites linking to you don’t gain any Google Juice from your blog.
The links work - people can click on them - but the links don’t provide any search engine value to the originating site/blog.
Why NoFollow?
The reason blog software like WordPress adds NoFollow is to minimize the benefit you’re giving any spammers who might sneak a comment or trackback in. If spammers’ links added search engine value back to their sites it would be quite beneficial for them - so NoFollow combats that.
Let’s Remove NoFollow Anyway
Recently there’s been a growing disenchantment with the NoFollow concept. If people provide legitimate, quality comments or links back to your blog, what’s the harm in giving them a little value in return? And with spam plugins like Akismet available (which do a very good job of stopping spam comments and trackbacks) it makes sense to open things up a bit and give your community some link love.
Andy Beard has a definitive list of DoFollow plugins available on his site.
Try The Link Love Plugin
I decided to implement one of the plugins called Link Love. It’s a newer plugin so I don’t know how well it works or how stable it is, but the idea is that it only removes NoFollow after a certain number of comments have been left by someone. You can set the determining value to whatever you want. I’ve set it to 3. So after you leave 3 comments, all of your links back to your site will have NoFollow removed.
I like this idea because it benefits my real community; people who frequent Instigator Blog regularly and participate. Those are the people I want to give some added value to.
DoFollow For Your True Community
NoFollow’s intention is worthy. But even with NoFollow being automatically done on blog software like WordPress you’ll still receive tons and tons of spam. So it’s not as if NoFollow by itself has stopped spammers. By removing it you’re telling your community that you care, and you’re willing to give ‘em a little link love.
Incidentally, I also enjoyed Dawud Miracle’s post about branding yourself through blog comments which added fuel to the fire for me to remove NoFollow.
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I assume that "DoFollow" links from commenting on blogs would be attributed less weight in terms of calculating "google juice" however? I wonder how this is achieved? (Or I am mistaken to think this..)
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I would combine it by having a clear comments policy because that provides a clear indication you won't tolerate comments that are purely for the link (nice post! I agree)
Mat, it is impossible to say, because no one really knows all the inner working of search engines.
It is known that they discount links in the sidebar, but links in comments surrounded by high quality content are less likely to be discounted.
I have been using dofollow on all my Wordpress blogs for some time. It is a great way to encourage legitimate thought provoking comments, and links from others.
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I once read (maybe in a couple places) that having a comment policy actually encourages more people to comment - any thoughts on that?
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I can't see any harm in providing a clear comments policy, and I have had a few people link to mine, in the same way I have linked to Teli's in the past and posts she has written about comments policies
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I've seen a significant increase in conversation since then. Good stuff all the way around.
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Your blog receives a certain amount of juice from links, and so can only pass on the same juice.
What you have done effectively is devalued the benefit of the links in the comments by a considerable amount multiplied by the fact that the top commenters links are on all your duplicate content pages, along with your blog roll.
Sidebar links are devalued by search engines and also don't benefit from having relevant content around them.
Smart commenters will leave comment links to related content on their blogs, as I will do now, linking through to my post on why I actually loathe top commenters plugins, even exceeding my dislike for blogrolls.
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I'm perfectly willing to admit that the up tick in comments may be purely psychological because folks like recognition.
Of course there is the off chance that my writing is improving too. ;)
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Found the branding through comments article to be very interesting indeed.. I'm gonna write something about it on my blog :)
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Do let us know should you have any issues with the plugin.
Cheers Ben.
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Its the leprechaun in me - so blame it on the Irish :)
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And Andy, thanks for bringing up some great points. I, too, will re-evaluate what's in my sidebar - especially once I remove the nofollow.
One question Andy, what's your take on a blogroll page - like on Mike Sansone's blog? Any benefit beyond the sidebar other than as just a reference for interested visitors?
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Lots of posts on my blog have mentioned it, and you can download it for free, along with access to the Dynamic Linking book by Leslie Rhode. I just included a link through to where I first discussed it.
I modify the thinking, because blogs are not a controlled environment, but it will give you a good understanding of how external links are leaks... but maybe leaks you want.
External links are much more worthwhile from good content, and that includes comments, so if you are going to share link love, you should try to make it as efficient as possible, but at the same time control how much you give away on each particular page. You wouldn't want your most popular posts to leak like a sieve.
Among the most powerful linking structures RofM discusses, you only have a link to your sitemap from the homepage, and would then include a link from your sitemap to your links pages, along with links to each article.
One reason that doesn't work well on blogs is because Technorati parses your front page, and ignores nofollow normally.
I work on the theory that I want as many internal links as possible using LSI related keywords and related posts. It is a very messy linking structure, but my theory is that is helps search engines work out relevance.
I like Mikes Blogroll page, as it is a useful resource for his readers. He should probably avoid giving it a sitewide followable link, because there isn't really much content around the links to give them relevance.
The best links Mike creates are in his content, I just love the way he weaves links into poetry.
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I am assuming the bots will follow the links from the comments section now. I have also incorporated a comments policy and CAPTCHA. I would recomend Protect web form at http://www.protectwebform.com/. It is free. I had to search for one and install it about a month ago - when I got about 50 spam comments (and I did not even have moderate option on. Atleast now I am safe from automated submission.
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Great blog, btw :)
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