Are you as confused as I was when I first read the above statement? What exactly are we talking about here? The term “nofollow” is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

In order to generate back links and improve their ranking, many bloggers have installed a WordPress plugin that gets rid of the standard “nofollow” element attached to blog comments. The community of bloggers has dubbed this the “doFollow” movement or the “u comment, I follow” interest group.

As a result, the search engines will track-back all of the commentators’ links and share the blog post’s PageRank. While increasing community involvement and obtaining a greater number of comments on your blog may seem like a good idea at first, the practice has some very detrimental inadequacies which can create some aggravation for blog-masters.

  • Time Consuming: You will constantly need to delete bad comments, edit anchor links, moderate comments for unrelated links, offline links, and spam.
  • Offensive Content Linking: the Google ranking algorithm judges on what types of sites link to you, and what types of sites you link to, thus a comment by a distasteful site will penalize your authority ranking on all you post links.
  • Bogus Comments: there are unscrupulous bloggers who will flood you blog with useless comments just to obtain links to your high ranked or popular blog.
  • Zero Uptime Control: if a “top Commentator” to your blog suddenly shuts-down their external blogs site, you have no indication and your links goes nowhere – lowering all your Page Ranks.
  • No Incentive to Enrich Your Writing: If readers are only posting for links, you won’t receive opposing opinions, productive comments or encouragement to improve your writing skills.
  • Reduced Search Engine Traffic: Too many (ie: 100’s) backlinks from “doFollow” comments can leech you PageRank, lower the page Authority of your blog. Keep a balance of links (40-60) that are truly of value to you blog content will give you much higher rank.
  • Keyword Spammers (Anchor Text Comments): Many readers looking for self-gratifying rank, will flood the “name” field of the comments box with their own keywords. As moderator, you must spend time editing these out.
  • Increased Comment Spam: Your blog will be listed under “dofollow” by search engines, allowing hundreds of spammers to easily find you; they will pretend to write legitimate blog comments or only say “great post” for the sole purpose of links. These spammers do nothing to build a community around your blog.
  • There Is another Way: the “Top Commentators” WordPress plugin provides your most devoted readers a way to receive a free bonus benefit for contributing to your posts, while filtering out the majority of spam and “one-time” readers. The plugin also helps to manage bad links, anchor texts, and 404 pages.

Whether you choose to use “DoFollow” or “NoFollow” is entirely up to your personal choice, but I don’t see the point on creating an extra workload for yourself, especially when the negative effects will in all probability out weigh the benefits.
The good news is, for those of you who still want to use “doFollow”, there is a free new plugin available from Greg Boser at: New DoFollow Plugin which has DoFollow/NoFollow control at the individual comment and post level.

Good luck, and Happy Blogging.


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