I was wondering what people’s opinions are on whether or not it’s better to make blog comments links nofollow?
I’ve currently set them to pass link juice, and I also use a plugin called ‘comment luv’ which automatically picks up links to their posts and passes juice that way as well.
I guess it might encourage people to comment, but I am noticing a lot of the outgoing links going to sites totally off topic.
So my question is, d’you think leaving blog comment links as follow might be harming my site in the SERPS?
I would always use nofollow links in blog comments because every single follow link that exits your site will devalue the links and too many will devalue your whole site. By using nofollow you are protecting yourself and your blog.
[font=verdana]If you have the time and patience to moderate comments, delete links that are spam or just irrelevant, and generally keep an eye on things and make sure that only ‘good’ links are allowed to remain then it’s fine to allow links to pass juice. If you’re struggling with that then it might be sensible to set them to “nofollow”.
I don’t buy the argument that every outbound link harms you by taking link juice that could be concentrated on your own links – for a start, if we all went down that route then the entire system behind search engines would collapse. But if you’re getting a high volume of “bad” links – that is links to spammy, dodgy or unrelated sites – that that could affect your reputation in Google’s eyes. Sites are deemed to be responsible for outbound links, whether they’re in editorial or user-generated content, and you don’t want Google to think you’re condoning lots of dodgy links.[/font]
Thanks for the advice, I think what you’ve said makes sense so I’ve gone and audited all my comment links, a bit shocked to find about 50% of them being a bit spammy so I’ve got rid of those and kept the ones I feel are genuine.
I have this other site where traffic dropped by about 70-80% this year, roughly during the penguin update I guess, and I only recently turned all user submitted links to no-follow. I’m wondering whether having 100s of potentially spammy outgoing links played a part in the massive hit I received in google traffic…
I think nofollow comments are generally better. People should be commenting on your site for the right reasons, and if you have a dofollow blog, you’ll get a lot of people who are just posting purely for the link power. I would wager that somewhere in Google’s algorithm it gives more weight to nofollow blogs than dofollow, but I can’t prove that.
Many blogs have added no follow tag to the comments. To get rid off the spam comments and links no follow is preferred by many bloggers. For active participation the comments should be made do follow. Moderate the comments and approve only the genuine comments. This would help to increase the count of genuine contributors.
Just for reference, the policy here on SPF is that links in your signature are marked as “nofollow”, but links in the message body are allowed to pass link juice. But we do have an army of 40+ staff diligently checking the forums all the time and obliterating any links we don’t think are appropriate.
Excellent speech. You are indeed SEO guru. I would like to suggest, no admin should use nofollow in blog comment page. Blog community is dying because of this reason. If you can’t manage your audience comments, if you don’t have time to find out spammers amongst your audience, then you should not create a blog. You have chosen the right path now act like you are right. If you enable nofollow then many audience will just left your website without even participating as nofollow means no value to them.
It depends what sort of people you want in your community. If you’re happy to have people who are only there for what they can get out of it – ie, links to their own pages – then you will encourage that kind of person, and it might be difficult to get a lot of real, positive engagement. On the other hand, if you make it clear up front that you want people who are going to participate for the sake of participating – ie, people who want to discuss things, share ideas, teach others what they know, just for the love of doing it – you’ll build a much stronger community. It might not have as many members, but it will often be better in the long run.
Frankly, I would never even dream of making any user-generated links not nofollow. I know from painful experience that SEO types only visit and post to blogs that don’t deploy nofollow links because they want the “SEO benefit”, despite there being no benefit whatsoever to posting on a “dofollow blog” (I HATE that word!)
Rightly said! The genuine users wouldn’t even bother if the links are do follow or no follow, moreover they wouldn’t even bother placing links at first place. And if someone is really willing to moderate the spammy comments, they can keep the comments as do follow.
And Harry, i guess making No follow or Do follow comments should be left at the admins discretion. If administrator of the blog finds it difficult to moderate the spammy comments, then its better to allow only no follow comments.
That’s the problem of making blog comment no-follow, you’ll probably have to deal with hundreds of spammy comments that usually don’t have anything to do with the nature of the post the comments are submitted to.