Time to Switch to Dofollow Comments

As a fol­lowup to a past post on Blo­gus­sion about the Google Algo­rithm change, “Jeet” from GetLinksPro has explained the impact of the change in his own words.

I have always advised blog­gers to switch to dofol­low com­ments and mod­er­ate the com­ments with a tight fist. This not only rewards the con­trib­u­tors it also brings a lot of traf­fic from smaller dofol­low search engines and links from dofol­low lists and directories.

I per­son­ally pre­fer and rec­om­mend using the dofol­low plu­g­ins that can impose a limit of min­i­mum 3 – 5 com­ments before a dofol­low link is given.

But I sin­cerely believe that now is the time for peo­ple who are still nofol­low­ing their com­ment links to switch to dofol­low; rather it was an year ago when Google changed their treat­ment of nofol­low links — but we didn’t come to know about it until recently.

An Expla­na­tion in my Own Words

I will try to explain the changes in inter­pre­ta­tion of nofol­low links in my words, though you can use the orig­i­nal ref­er­ence (Matt Cutt’s post and some excel­lent com­ments there).

Ear­lier, if a page had 5 links and page had a PR5, 20% of the PR juice flowed to these links. It was slightly below 20% because a decay fac­tor was intro­duced to ensure that all pages don’t end up get­ting a PR10; but we won’t go into those details.

If you had a con­tact and a pri­vacy page out of these 5, it was very easy to manip­u­late the PR flow by nofol­low­ing the links to con­tact and pri­vacy page. Thus, the PR”>PR juice was dis­trib­uted among three pages only and these pages got 33% PR juice each.

PageR­ank sculpt­ing or nofol­low was a great method to increase the PR for inter­nal pages by nofol­low­ing links to exter­nal pages or to con­tact / pri­vacy type of pages.

What That All Means

With the new changes, how­ever, the effort of nofol­low­ing is wasted com­pletely and you won’t get the 33% PR juice on remain­ing three links even if you dofol­low the 2 pages. It can still be argued that only 10% juice is leaked for each of these nofol­low links (as com­pared to 20% ear­lier) and that leaves us with 80/3% ~ 26% PR juice remain­ing for the remain­ing 3 links. But that’s not for sure and I wouldn’t be sur­prised if the remain­ing links are still get­ting only 20% juice (with a decay).

So now that we have estab­lished that nofol­low­ing links is not going to affect the inter­nal link­ing much it’s much bet­ter to dofol­low exter­nal links in com­ments, at least some­one is ben­e­fit­ing from these links and that some­one is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to your blog.

So, rather than throw­ing away 20% of PR juice, it could be given away to some­one who vis­its your blog reg­u­larly and makes it a point to write an infor­ma­tive comment.

How Did I Put That?

I tried to explain this new change in the flow of PageR­ank to a page using a dif­fer­ent kind of exam­ple here. Let me know how I did, and if you have any ques­tions, don’t hes­i­tate to ask!

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