Time to Switch to Dofollow Comments

jitendraag — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:04:24 +0000

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!

Debate: DoFollow vs. NoFollow Links

Janith — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:39:51 +0000

In a recent post, Jeet’s guest post entitled “Get some Comment Love for your static website” sparked quite a bit of discussion, and raised the issue between NoFollow and DoFollow blogs.

As many of you might have realized (noting the massive image we have on the sidebar) that Blogussion was made a DoFollow blog several weeks ago. This decision, undoubtedly came with its own benefits and downfalls, but it was a result of critical thinking and past experiences.

Relatively speaking, it’s almost 50-50 when it comes to bloggers going DoFollow or NoFollow. Even though almost every blogger seems to have their biased opinion on the issue, there is a handful of minority that aren’t aware of the great differences.

I want to re-raise the debatable issue between NoFollow and DoFollow blogs, and just share with you my opinion; grounded by several key facts..

What is NoFollow?

Wikipedia: Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some 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.

To put it in simple terms; NoFollow is an HTML attribute that is assigned to a hyperlink that instructs the search engine crawler that the targeted page should not be awarded with a SERP boost.

Most search engines, including Google, rank web-pages using several algorithms and one of them being; how many in-links a certain page has from external sources.

There is a pretty simple reason behind this algorithm. The more in-links you have to your web-page, it’s a clear indication that you have useful content. Search Engines use the number and quality of your in-links to assign you a rank within search results.

NOTE: The tag “DoFollow” is not a real tag or ALT attribute, because it is non-existent. If a link doesn’t contain the ‘Nofollow’ attribute then it is automatically deemed to be a ‘Dofollow’ link.

Why Should You Care?

If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, you might know this but all your links are made nofollow by default. You might not want to play around with the default settings, but after reading the following points – you might be change your mind.

Not only for WordPress users, but every webmaster should decided whether to leave a blog NoFollow or make it DoFollow. They are obvious traffic, SEO and even social benefits and downfalls of both attributes – but to make your choice a bit more clearer, I will run through the Pros/Cons of both.

Making Your Blog NoFollow

Pro: Untrusted Content

If you need to link to a certain site that doesn’t seem very trustworthy and genuine, you can attach the NoFollow tag to prevent spammers from picking up on your website. Think of it this way – every page you link to means you are recommending that site to someone else. Assign it a NoFollow tag and you are effectively telling the crawler “This site and mine have nothing to do with each other”

Pro: Paid Links

As you all know, Google penalizes paid links unless they are NoFollow. If you want to sell ad-space on your blog; make sure it has the NoFollow tag or else you will be penalized for breaching Google TOS. Not only Google, but this applies to several other key search engines.

Pro: Preserve Link Juice

By assigning NoFollow tags to all your external links, you are effectively preserving link juice within your website. By keep the “link juice” in circulation of your site, you can help yourself to attain a higher PageRank.

Pro: Prioritize Your Links

Do you really want the search engine crawler visiting your login/registration pages? What about your Disclaimer and Terms of Use? There really isn’t any point for the crawler to visit these pages, so by assigning NoFollow tags to these in-links you can save both time and bandwidth.

Con: You Lose Blog Activity

By adding the NoFollow attribute, you will almost certainly discourage comments, especially from the link-savvy. This is one of the biggest let-downs of NoFollow blogs, but if you can implement the tag subtly and as sparingly as possible; you might just get away with this!

Con: Destroys the fundamentals of Hyperlinking

When you link to an external source using a hyperlink, you are inevitably sharing that site’s content with your readers and guests. The basic fundamental behind hyperlinks is to “spread the word” but by sticking in a NoFollow tag you are indirectly breaking this tender bond. A lovely quote from LeftBlank was;

“…with these ‘nofollow’ tags a search engine will simply ignore those links, potentially rendering them unfindable on the web.”

Making Your Blog DoFollow

Pro: Encourages Comments

Many webmasters scout around for DoFollow blogs to leave comments because it is the easiest way to get back-links. This can encourage many bloggers/website owners to leave comments on your blog in an effort to earn some extra back-links

Pro: Make use of Top Commentators & CommentLuv

These plugins are two of my favorites because it really gets the community going. When someone takes the time to reply to your posts, why shouldn’t you reward them with some spotlight credit? In my humble, and non-factual opinion – I think without DoFollow tags, these two plugins are pretty useless.

Pro: Awesome Marketing Point

If you can afford to make your blog DoFollow – you can really use it as a marketing point. By telling people and by showing off your site is DoFollow; you can attract some visitors that might turn out to be some nice conversions.

Con: Encourages Spam

DoFollow blogs are loved by lifeless spam bots. This can be a very irritating aspect of making your blog DoFollow because even though you are trying to reward your commentators, I can almost guarantee that your comment-moderation will multiply by several folds!

Con: Sacrifice Your Authority

If you start handing out DoFollow links to every person/bot and gust of wind that comes by your blog – your authority as a blogger might soon evaporate. Maintain a sense of dignity and be selective in who you reward

Con: Leak Link Juice

In theory, you are pretty much handing out PageRank and link juice to every link that hasn’t got a NoFollow tag. This is really generous of you, but you might feel a bit used and actually suffer from a SEO perspective.

Final Say.

Here are Blogussion, Alex and I have agreed to keep our blog DoFollow. It was almost an instantaneous decision without much though because we value our community over SEO and organic traffic. For us, our guests and commentators that take part in our discussions means a lot more than a stream of traffic.

So, most external links on our blog is DoFollow and we have both the above mentioned plugins. We have already experience a bit of a SEO hit, where we were assigned only a PageRank 2 even though we have in excess of 7.000 in-links, even a few from PR4-5 websites.

Quite frankly, we aren’t worried about it one bit. It has really helped grow our community and we are thankful for that! This does not mean it will work for you and your blog. Take into consideration every point I’ve stated above and come to an informed decision.

A balance of DoFollow and NoFollow links usually work the best, but it takes a lot more management. If you have the time – I would recommend you carefully examine the majority of your links on your website and assign them appropiate ALT attributes.

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