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Nofollow in Comments
By Robert Campbell on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
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I have seen many discussions on whether or not you should use nofollow for a comment author’s URL. I honestly didn’t know which way to go so I decided to go right down the line with a neat little fix. First a little bit about the pros and cons.
Allowing the Follow
The major pro? It can encourage people to write comments on your posts. The major con? It leeches your PR, and could bring you down a little in the rankings. Get enough comments on a post, and your site might even look spammy to a search engine.
Being Mean, NoFollow
The major pro? All those visitors comments, if you get any now, will not hurt your search rankings. The major con? You may not get as many comments. I call it mean, because I feel it’s similar to having someone come into your store, and not saying thank you for visiting.
My Solution
My solution to the problem is to incorporate a little bit of both worlds. I give the first three comment authors their full credit. Comments made after the third, incorporate rel=”nofollow”. Immediate input is encouraged, and having a list full of outbound links prevented. I keep getting posters, and keep my SEO dignity.
Plugin
So I am also guessing some of you might want this as a plugin for WordPress. I am going to make one in the next day or two. It was such an easy fix to my template though, I just had to get it going without one. Edit four lines of code or write an entire plugin? Let me see:)
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Category: BWI Tags: comments follow spammy, nofollow, plugin, pr, rel="nofollow", seo, Wordpress
I was actually wondering before about the whole nofollow thing and you summed it up greatly with the “coming into a store and not saying thank you”. Brilliant, thanks for the clarification. I will definitely come back for later web help.
-Visin
http://www.azerothnow.com
I discovered after a year of running a “no nofollow” plugin, my site experienced an influx of spammy comments. I didn’t feel the fake comments were worth it. It felt insulting after a while.
Angela,
I use the Akismet plugin to kill of the spam like stuff. It blocks most, and combined with very little self management, I’d say almost all of it gets deleted. Another thing I do is control my old posts. Some never got any comments until months later, where they seem to always be spam. I just stop allowing comments on those posts.