Great post, Ben. I’ve just put LinkLove on my blog. Thanks for all the great ideas you put out there for helping people develop their personal brand.

Enjoyed the post Ben. I’d seen the “No Follow” debate circulating around, but had not had time to dip into enough to learn the issues. Your summary brought me up to speed.

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..)

Good move Ben

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.

Andy – a comment policy eh? Ya, that’s a good idea, I should do that. I guess I always figure people would get the idea that stupid comments for the sake of link love won’t fly…but it’s worth investigating a policy further.

I once read (maybe in a couple places) that having a comment policy actually encourages more people to comment – any thoughts on that?

Excellent explanation. I think you’ve convinced me to make the move. Do Follow is much better than Top Commentators, as Andy also wrote.

Hard to say, I have blogs with open comments using dofollow and PR5 that rarely get comments unless it is automated spam, though I don’t advertise the fact because they are not really community sites.

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

Heya Ben! I’m with you on the DoFollow thing. I made the switch a couple weeks back and added the Show Top Commentors Plugin at the same time to further reward meaningful comments from folks.

I’ve seen a significant increase in conversation since then. Good stuff all the way around.

Chris that is actually a common misconception.

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.

I appreciate that Andy. Went and read the article too. Don’t know enough about how Google works to follow your milk bottle analogy for internal links.

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.

Thanks Ben, for turning off NoFollow and sharing the link love!

Found the branding through comments article to be very interesting indeed.. I’m gonna write something about it on my blog

I’ll get around to adding this to my new blog design.

Do let us know should you have any issues with the plugin.

Cheers Ben.

As others have already said: great idea. Along this idea of giving the virtual “shout out” to readers that comment often, how about adding someone’s website address to their comment title? I was something in line with a plugin that places a yes/no question next to the website field (e.g. display website with name in comment title: yes_ no_). This way people that comment get an opportunity to plug their site and still add to the comment discussion here on the site.

I use Blogger so don’t follow a lot of what you guys are yakking about – so it’s beyond fascinating to me – I’ll try Andy’s trick though. Ben? can you let me know if you get a link to the turtle meme? in which you are tagged?

Its the leprechaun in me – so blame it on the Irish

Good post and good tips! I’ve installed DoFollow on my blog .

Great conversation. I really appreciate the topic as I’ve been thinking about this too for a couple of weeks. For me, there’s no debate, I’m removing nofollow with the next update to my blog – coming in a few weeks.

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?

My way of thinking is highly modified from the ideas discussed in Revenge of the Mininet

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.

I’ll have to try out the linklove plugin. Keep instigating.

I recently removed the tag rel=”nofollow” from my blog. I have also added the “follow” meta tag for the bots.

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.

Looks like the “Dump NoFollow” crusade is picking up. Your right, Ben, it’s high time people open up and start spreading some goodwill around. We shouldn’t be held ransom by the spam menace.

It’s nice to see that bloggers are giving up on no-follow since everything has to be de-spamified anyways.

Great blog, btw

David – thanks for the comment – glad you like the blog, hope to see you around some more!

I joined the ranks of the linking revolution as well. See my DoFollow declaration on my blog.

I have been using the dofollow plugin since mid-February and haven’t noticed any additional spam or spammy comments. I never liked the nofollow attribute and am thankful it may being going the way of the Dodo.