Comments on: Removing the nofollow tags from comments

By: David Airey

David Airey — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:20:59 +0000

I’m an advocate of removing the NoFollow and have done so on my creative design blog.

By: Harvey

Harvey — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 18:26:24 +0000

It’s pretty easy to tell if a commenter has something to add or not.

-If it’s pure spam, easy to spot.
-If it’s a SEO going for the easy link, it’s a “Great post!” comment with keyword rich anchor text instead of a person’s name.
-If it’s a SEO that is prepared to post something useful, then in my books it’s as good as a non-seo posting something useful.

I’m actually thinking of going one step further and adding a field for “anchor text” – that is, if I really like the comment, I use your chosen text for the link instead of the name.
But no way would this be rolled out for all comments – I only consider it because I’m manually checking anyway.

By: SEFL

SEFL — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 16:51:46 +0000

I like the case-by-case idea. A blanket solution either way doesn’t work because there are different links and different posters and thus different levels of usefulness to a blog in general. Why paint them all with the same brush?

“Me too, me too, me too!” (Sorry, Lea.)

By: Lea de Groot

Lea de Groot — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 10:39:29 +0000

I don’t think blogs will ever just be able to ‘turn off the nofollow’. Too many people will post ‘me toos’ with names on-topic for their link to get easy links.
But letting quality commenters have a link doesn’t seem unreasonable – I haven’t looked at Case By Case, but if it can be set for eg only on the second post; only if post is longer than X (40? 50 char?); etc then it would certainly be worth experimenting with.
The perfect outcome is to encourage people to comment without giving people an incentive to leave valueless comments.
IMHO :)

By: Harvey

Harvey — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 03:53:18 +0000

I just made the switch to not using nofollow. Cool people share link love.

I manually read every comment anyway, so it’s easy to either delete the comment because it’s spam, leave it nofollowed if it doesn’t add much, or remove the nofollow if it does add something to the discussion.

Remember, nofollow is to deter spam, not prevent bloggers from helping each other get good rankings.

By: Halfdeck

Halfdeck — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 03:17:49 +0000

It would definitely be an incentive for people to comment more often, but the ball would still be in your court because I’d only comment if you write something that interests me or I have something unique to add.

By: Marios Alexandrou

Marios Alexandrou — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 00:50:26 +0000

I don’t think you’ll ever be able to turn off the nofollow across the board. There are way too many “great post, man” type comments going around. Whether the sentiment is genuine or not, you don’t want to encourage this type of comment because in the end it’s just clutter.

But the idea of selecting the best comment per day, week, or post seems like a good compromise. Of course, you can’t let the rest of us decide for you. We’re all too self-serving to trust :-)

By: David Eaves

David Eaves — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 20:50:39 +0000

I think it is a great idea to reward the poeple who post on your blog with a folowed link, I see far to much of this nofollow business these days.