Why I’m changing this blog’s comments to ‘dofollow’
By default, comments on most blogs contain a small bit of code (’nofollow’) which tells search engine spiders not to follow any links in the comment. This is to prevent spammers posting comments (”Hi webmaster!”) with the intention of improving their Google rankings. ‘Nofollow’ means search engines (mostly) ignore the link.
However, this also removes recognition of the work of genuine commenters.
For this reason, and because my spam filters are pretty effective, as of now this blog is using the dofollow plugin, which means if you post a comment, any link (including that linking your name to your blog) will be credited by search engine spiders.
As this blog has a Google PageRank of 6, that ‘credit’ is actually quite valuable, if you’re bothered about search engine rankings and that sort of thing.
This may blow up in my face, but I’m going to try it and see how this goes. The plugin does include some options to restrict which comments are followed by search engines (for example including a cooling period before nofollow is removed, which I am using), and I may explore those.
In the meantime, here’s some background from elsewhere:
How Search Engines Use NoFollow
From Squidoo (which also has a list of web services which do not use nofollow):
- Google follows NoFollow links but simply does not pass on credit to an outbound link that is tagged with the attribute.
- Yahoo follows NoFollow links and excludes the link from all ranking calculations.
- MSN may or may not follow a NoFollow link, but it does exclude it from ranking calculations.
- Ask.com does not adhere to NoFollow.
Reasons to use a nofollow tag
1) Paid Links: This is recommended by Google. Essentially, your sites page rank give a small amount of rank juice to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking, which is the purpose of link building, to get that juice from others). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that.
2) Maybe in your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link juice back to their site. It is personal preference.
3) When linking to major, very popular sites. If you are linking to google.com, yahoo.com, digg.com (the front page), cnn.com, or whoever else, they are already popular, so you might as well use “nofollow” since your link won’t make or break them.
Dofollow blog commenting netiquette
- You can write: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant. You can also link to to an about page covering you. Also if you do not want to disclose your name or job position, you can even write something like Bob of Miller Real Estate or at least leave your initials to enable me to address you: AJ of Miller Real Estate but don’t write Miller Real Estate, AJ. Imagine being on a party again: You say your name first when you introduce yourself and then you tell people what you do for a living.
- I appreciate people being thankful for a post but unless your refer to the specific post or I know your blog URL I have no way of determining whether you are a bot or not. So write something like “thank your for the post, it helped me with …”
- If you want a piece of meat at a barbecue you don’t just drop in, take it and leave the party instantly. Stay for a minute to read the post, say “hi” and then leave.
- Do you speak German addressing people on a party where nobody understands it? Try to translate at least. So do not write Web design Köln, but Mark of Dom Web Webdesign in Cologne
- Imagine yourself on a party when asked about what you do for a living telling people, “Dirt Devil M110002!” So, as I said above, a page about you is OK, your homepage vacuumcleaners.com also but not a specific product page. Akismet will spam you in most cases you use subpages anyways.
- A barbecue party is not a trade fair, you do not wear your name plate on your lapel. You just introduce yourself, that’s enough. So skip the additional signature.
- Now imagine someone entering a barbecue party shouting: This place sucks, meat is murder, you dirty bastards stink! I guess such a person gets thrown out immediately. If you disagree, do it politely, with style after at least reading what this site is about. Of course I will delete trolls who offend me for all “SEOs being spammers“.
Finally, you may want to explore the No Nofollow community.
Written by Paul Bradshaw - Visit Website
53 Comments, Comment or Ping
Nick Booth
Good idea. I’ll be curious to see if the weight of potential extra spam interest will break the dam wall called akismet - or rather you resolve to keep marking spam as spam.
Sep 2nd, 2008
Tad Chef
This step makes sense for most blogs. Thank you for adopting my commenting netiquette too, but dofollow on comments will have no impact here as your page head (on all pages) contains the “” aka noindex-nofollow meta-tag which equals a no trespasing sign for search engines for ALL of the site’s links. It’s Google suicide.
Sep 2nd, 2008
Michael Martine, Blog Consultant
If a blog is popular and has a high enough Google PageRank, it will be added to a list for spammers and be specifically targeted for comments.
Sep 2nd, 2008
paulbradshaw
Thanks Tad - am working on the meta nofollow tag.
Michael - am curious to see if that happens. If so, will backtrack.
Sep 2nd, 2008
mohamed
Good on you Paul. The whole “no-follow” is just a band-aid to the problem of spam…
Sep 2nd, 2008
Chris
I had never heard of this before. Really good information. I’m going to talk to our webmaster about this issue.
Sep 2nd, 2008
Tad Chef
Paul, you don’t need to work on it, just delete it
Sep 3rd, 2008
Rick
When I first learned about NoFollow I was fascinated by the whole thing. It seems to me that most blogs would want to encourage comments and I agree with Mohamed that NoFollow does not really address the problem. If you are interested in knowing if a blog is DoFollow, Link Building Bible has these instructions: http://linkbuildingbible.com/2008/06/10/how-to-easily-spot-nofollow-links/ that make any NoFollow link show up in a pink box.
It has been interesting to see if my behavior changed once I knew that my link would be marked NoFollow.
Sep 13th, 2008
malcolm coles
Paul - to continue in a more appropriate place what I was saying on another post … I know you’ve said it’s on your list of things to fix, but I didn’t understand why you installed a dofollow plugin when your meta data has a blanket nofollow setting?
Although the plugin strips out the nofollow that wordpress adds to individual links, the effect of having ‘meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow” in your HTML means both that ALL links are nofollowed plus the page isn’t indexed anyway.
So on both counts, there is no search engine ‘credit’ from any links on your blog - whether posted by you or a commenter.
Or am I misunderstanding something …?
Nov 5th, 2008
malcolm coles
Also, your use of ‘intensedebate’ for most of your post comments means that, if search engines were indexing the pages, the comments are invisible to search engines in any case because they now rely on javascript to be seen … (try looking at those pages with javascript off to see what I mean).
Right, I’ll shut up about the issue now (sorry, it’s just I got quite annoyed with the guardian recently for having a javascript-driven comment section, although that was more for accessibility reasons: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/the-guardian-and-accessibility/)
Nov 6th, 2008
paulbradshaw
That’s a very interesting point about IntenseDebate - does that mean that Google does not see the comments as new updates, either? I notice my PageRank has recently dropped from 7 to 6 and wondering why…
Nov 6th, 2008
malcolm coles
And I’ve thought of a way to prove it. Here’s someone else’s blog with intense debate installed.
Here’s their original page:
http://www.isaackeyet.com/blog/2007/intense-debate-has-launched/#respond
and here’s their page in the google cache - minus all comments:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:svusC-WcoTsJ:www.isaackeyet.com/blog/category/intense-debate/+isaac+keyet+intense+debate+has+launched&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk&client=firefox-a
Nov 6th, 2008
malcolm coles
That last post doesn’t make any sense as my one before vanished. What I was trying to prove was that google can’t see your comments at all on pages with intense debate (ID) - google doesn’t run javascript, and with JS off your comments are invisible (apart from this page, which isn’t using ID).
I can’t prove it for your site as your noindex means there is no google cache. But the two links in my other post prove it for another blog.
If you want to address this, you’d need to export your comments back from ID to wordpress. You’ll also be pleased to know that wordpress 2.7 is introducing threaded comments, so that functionality will soon be part of the core product.
Nov 6th, 2008
malcolm coles
And final post from me, then I’ll shut up, is about your worry about pagerank - until you fix the noindex issue, you won’t do well in google. For instance, do a search for ‘image of the day technical skills required by journalism jobs’.
You’d expect your post of the same name to do well - but this page looks really odd in the google results due to the noindex (just a URL, no page title, no meta description). And if you search for just ‘technical skills required by journalism jobs’ you don’t come anywhere …
Nov 6th, 2008
paulbradshaw
Thanks - meta finally solved, and wondering what to do about IntenseDebate - will be putting it out to readers.
Nov 7th, 2008
JustinLL
Such a great idea. I did the same thing at month or so ago using the word press plugin Lucia’s Link Love. Thought it would be nice to give back to the folks that posted relevant comments. And the spam filters are pretty good now, so very little of the trash gets through.
Thanks for sharing the link juice!
Nov 10th, 2008
HID
If you don’t loose PR, why worry about sharing some of the wealth.
Nov 11th, 2008
Video Guitar Lessons
Learning about this dofollow -
It is a great idea and generous thing to do — and hopefully it will catch on in some useful ways.
Using TypePad doesn’t seem like it will help in the dofollow area - but if someone is interested in swapping some useful content related guest blogging spots, that might be helpful and serve the collaborative nature of dofollow and sharing the juice.
Thanks,
Nov 23rd, 2008
Best Trends Blog
Keep up the great work
Dec 4th, 2008
mohan
SPAM the thing I don’t like in blogs..good post man,keep going…..
Dec 12th, 2008
Rick
Your post was very educational for me. I had not understood the various Search Engines handling of “no follow”. I appreciate the info.
Dec 17th, 2008
DP - BlogOnGeek.com
It is nice to see bloggers who are trying to solve spam problem with solution other than adding nofollow to all commenters links. I have just launched new blog and also left comment links dofollowed. My plan to combat spam is to read first time commenters comments before publishing and than delete them if spammy, if not, publish them with dofollow. It is a brand new blog, so this method is practical, but with high traffic blogs I guess some automated anti spam filters should be used, but I have never tried any. How successful can they be?
Jan 11th, 2009
paulbradshaw
I get a lot of traffic and from my experience the built in spam filter on Wordpress (Akismet) is very effective - I barely get any spam comments that make it through, including on occasions when I’ve had tens of thousands of visits in one week.
Jan 12th, 2009
Grog
I am thrilled you did it.
Jan 19th, 2009
Jessica
I really enjoyed reading this post… well thought out and written. Thank you!
Feb 12th, 2009
text ad exchange
Thanks for sharing this information. I wish more people would go with dofollow. I think nofollow cheapens a lot of blogs etc.
ROFL at the barbecue analogie.
Feb 17th, 2009
Sydney Accommodation
I often wonder about this ‘nofollow’ tag and it’s long term impact on people posting to blogs, after all it is only fair to give credit where credit is due and as time goes on people may (or may not) seek recognotion for the time they have taken to contribute. Having said that, I have received lots of spam in the past and it can be a real pain in so many ways. Thanks for the post and explanations. Jamie S.A.
Feb 20th, 2009
ssz
I also enjoyed reading this post… well thought out and good information!
Thanks
Feb 23rd, 2009
Bible Study Lessons | Guides
Thanks. I myself have been thinking about changing to ‘dofollow’, I have been learning how to do so? Thanks for the information.
Mar 3rd, 2009
Matt Wardman
Late comment.
I nofollow comments, but I run Comment-Luv instead - that is a plugin which adds a link to the last post on their RSS feed for people who enter a web address.
Mar 3rd, 2009
Deutschland spot
Great article. Nice blog. Keep it coming. Mike
Mar 12th, 2009
Kai Lo
Did Dofollow policy help increase traffic to your site? What about the increase in spam? It would give me a major headache if I get lots of spam to moderate. Let me know how DoFollow is going for you!
Mar 17th, 2009
paulbradshaw
It’s hard to say if it increased traffic to the site, but there has been almost no increase in spam. More lately I’ve had one or two human spam comments - not sure if that’s related as a lot of time has passed - but these are easy to spot.
Mar 17th, 2009
jQuery HowTo
This is a great idea, but unfortenately having doFollow in your blog comments attracts lots of spammers. There is a big chance your blog will be spammed heavily…
But it’s nice to have a link back from PR6 page …
The “jQuery Howto” blog is about jQuery javascript library with a lot of good and quality tips, performance tests and tutorials.
Mar 18th, 2009
CLEP
Do follow comments add to the link luv, plus you get more traffic and commentators on your blog when you offer dofollow links.
Mar 21st, 2009
Alex Wrobel
Thats a good idea. I think I will be starting to do dofollow as well. With the addition of new wordpress plugins, it should help a lot to reduce spam.
Askimet, and bad behaviour do a pretty good job of stopping spam, however it is not a total solution.
Mar 26th, 2009
Printer Ink Dude
Encouraging commenting is the purpose of allowing dofollow links.
What should be stopped is the constant spammers of the blog just to gain Google juice or for link building.
There must be some other way of stopping spammers other than a nofollow.
Thanks,
Jimi P.
Apr 3rd, 2009
Work At Home
I have change my blog to dofollow too. I think it is good to share some to our blog commentators who have take some time to read and comment. Akismet is the best spam plugin that works with dofollow blogs. I’m sure you agree with that.
Apr 6th, 2009
Inventory Managment Guru
Can you possibly do a follow-up post on the impact that becoming a DoFollow blog has on your traffic, quality of visitors, and site engagement? I think that would help us in making the decision on whether to do this on our own blogs.
Apr 6th, 2009
barkan
Interesting post but true if you allow any one to post a comment and put nofollow to links than i can’t understand why people give a option to put website name on to it dofollow comments are not counted as spam if they are on topic and participate and contribute in blogpost article.
Apr 8th, 2009
scriviperme
Thank you for your post. I am an Italian newbie blogger, and your suggestions are very interesting for me.
Apr 10th, 2009
RadioHead
Very interesting post! I agree that encouraging blog commenting is important BUT you do want to keep the spammers away. Getting this accomplished is no easy task.
However, I do believe that even nofollow links are still relevant since the search engine spider will ’see’ it and count it as a link. They just wont pass any juice. I guess its up to the individual.
Just my 2-cents!
Cheers!
May 1st, 2009
mathew
Do u know if we use intensedebate as blog’s comment plugin.Is it dofollowing or infollowing
May 3rd, 2009
paulbradshaw
I stopped using IntenseDebate because it is invisible to search engines generally, i.e. nofollow
May 5th, 2009
BFM@latest headlines
To the comment above, akismet is solid, I doubt it will be broken that easy. As to dofollow, I don’t know, I think it’s ok, another incentive to post, or post more often.
May 6th, 2009
Winchester Journalism
Well I am interested in building page rank - but that is not why I would post on this blog. I don’t have any comment spots on any of my online stuff because I am worried about liability for libel more than anything else - spam is the least of anyone’s worries I would suggest. Any as I suggested in a previous post it would be good to align the course at your place with the one at wincehster since they are both new, and they are both online only forms of journalism platformwise. Yrs Chris - Chris@horrie.com or chris.horrie@winchester.ac.uk
May 8th, 2009
Pink Cellphones
Hi. I’m new to blogging and so all this information about nofollow and dofollow is actually quite confusing. I’ve read your post a couple of times now and I still don’t think I understand why amending your comments to do-follow is a good idea vs the no-follow route. I though page rank was the most important thing and that providing lots of links to other sites potentially jeopardised the page rank status, so are you not risking your page rank?
Sorry if this seems a basic question.
May 11th, 2009
Rickin Parker
Its very hard to get backlinks now a days. One should concentrate on naturally generated backlinks or links to your website. Just concentrete on the quality of the content posted on your website, the rest will be on viewer disposal. If they like your post, you will be rewarded otherwise you have to wait more.
Anyways, Thanks for putting your post
Jun 10th, 2009
Neetu Sharma
Good Paul, we will also try to set nofollow attributes to stop spam. It increase spamming i think and will be concious in future
Jun 18th, 2009
Dogma crew
Very good idea!! It is also very good for your blog, and that leaves the other links in your blog also boost your pagerank.
Jun 26th, 2009
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Thank you so much for sharing this. I welled up at the end. Very powerful stuff.van contract hire
Jul 4th, 2009
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