Use “nofollow” to enjoy the better rankings
Some time ago I promised to write about my approach to use of nofollow for blog comments. Personally I do think that all comment links at dofollow blogs have no SEO value, and now I’m gonna clarify my thesis.
Being out of the “context”
If you are interested in SEO, you know well that links from sites topically related to yours can offer measurable boost for your rankings. So if you do SEO for a website about gaming, in most cases links from sites run by people interested in gaming do best for your business. Unfortunately, that thing is also able to work in a opposite way – if all of links to your site are coming from bad neighborhoods, your site probably will be not marked as a trustworthy place in the web, too.
Number of external links on a single page
There are two different schools of SEO, one claims that number of outgoing links decreases your Google PageRank. In my humble opinion it’s enough to know which of them is preferred by services owned by Google – both Blogger and YouTube do use nofollow for all needless external links. Consider it.
Even short comments matter
My friend from Italy made a smart WordPress plugin that does block all short comments before processing. However, I’m afraid this is not the best way to fight spam. Even a few-word-long comment could be fine, don’t you think so? Just take a look at comments at Digg, or Reddit.
There’s only one good way to share the link juice
When you remove “nofollow” from comments written on your blog, your link juice simply gets out of your control. And I think we can say that use of dofollow plugins can only decrease both PageRank & TrustRank of your site. Sharing link love with people that participate in local community by making use of Top Commentators ranking looks much safer to me. When someone does have a “spammy habit” you can easily add his name to the blacklist.
Comments (used to be turned on, now they are disabled):
Krzysztof Lis at September 19th, 2007
Indeed, I believe that we need to learn from Blogspot, since it’s owned by Google.
Giving dofollow for comment links makes commenting valuable, visitors gain SEO_Power. So you get more comments. If you have “top commentators” installed, you give SEO_Power only for few people, so it’s something like you had contest for “who writes most comments”. So you probably get even more comments.
Bart at September 19th, 2007
@Krzysztof: What are you thinking about? Which option is better: to save SEO power for sites linked within your posts & Top Commentators ranking, or to have a spammy-stinking blog-bucket? I don’t have a dilemma, guess you do the same.
However, larger amount of comments is pretty delusive haha
Krzysztof Lis at September 19th, 2007
Every young blogmaster (blog owner) wants to have as many comments as possible. The younger he (she) is, the more intense is that urge.
I simply want to have comments so I know that my work is being read by others. I also want to know if they think what I write is interesting and what they me to write, ’cause sometimes I know I should write something but don’t know what…
Bart at September 20th, 2007
It’s all about Hitnosis (refreshing your browser repeatedly to see if your hit counter or comments have increased), Commentariat (readers who comment) and Blogstipation (writer’s block for bloggers).
Krzysztof Lis at September 20th, 2007
I only have RSS readers counter, and watch hits on Analytics with one day delay. Good for me.
Acopic Web Design at September 24th, 2007
I personally haven’t got a problem with dofollow or top commenters. It really should’t be an issue. We’re only discussing it here because it gets abused. If someone wants to use nofollow then thats fine – people shouldn’t be leaving comments just for the link.
Jon Holato at September 26th, 2007
Wikipedia has flip flopped with this but I believe currently they are using nofollow.
Bart at September 27th, 2007
And this is exactly why I do add rel=”nofollow” to every link to Wikipedia
Krzysztof Lis at September 27th, 2007
Me too. :) If they don’t share their PR, I won’t be giving them mine either…
mark rushworth at September 27th, 2007
nofollow is a complete fallacy… if you dont want outbound links form your comments dont give people the option to post url’s simple as that. the principle of nofollow is complete lunacy. “add your link… but ah HA… we’re not gonna give it any weight” whats the point.
Krzysztof Lis at September 27th, 2007
And I always thought that leaving comment with url gives me some visits from people interested in what I have to say.
Bart at September 27th, 2007
As well as nofollow added to links doesn’t make spammers much impressed.
Jon Holato at September 28th, 2007
@ Mark Rushworth – I must respectfully disagree with your statement, because there is still a value to putting your link in a comment even if it is nofollow. That value is that it’s still a gateway to your site, even if search engine spiders don’t follow it, users like you and I can. I often see commenter’s links getting clicked hundreds of times on my site if they make a good comment.
@ Krzysztof Lis – You’re exactly right, it does. I’ve clicked on all of your (Bart’s commenters) pages before.
14. Mark Rushworth at September 28th, 2007
Jon Holato: yes but as far as SEO goes, only on Yahoo and to a lesser extent MSN. Any click based traffic is purely based on comment merit and as we’re not selling anything through comments the chances of a conversion are low.
Bart at September 28th, 2007
I found a good explanation of it – check this out.
Asuka at March 12th, 2009
I have not been working at my blog lately and the pagerank went down… When I did blog actively my pagerank was gaining a point every update (3 x) I was not using nofollow, I had plenty of outgoing links…All my inbound link where from related sites, so I think that does the major impact…relevant!
Jan at March 19th, 2009
Mark Rushworth is completely right. From my websites I link to those which I want link to. I don’t link to sites which I don’t want link to. What’s the point of a link which carry no weight? It’s not a link!
Even though Google is sending more than 150K visits to my best site, I think that if people at Google want to fight against spam (in terms of links) and paid links, then they should come with new algorithm that would ignore links. New algorithm would bring more or less visits, but men, this is the world that Google created! They based the ranking algorithm on links.
No instead of giving nofollow links… link or don’t link. This blog should be one of those many which need the “website” input field disabled. Agree or disagree… I DON’T care.
And BTW, filtering short comments is a perfect way how to fight against spam! Also filtering comments without at least one dot is good. Senseless sentences are… useless.
Bart at March 19th, 2009
@Jan: One question to you — saying nothing of this *new algorithm* ’cause the issue is rather unsolvable at this moment of time — how would you keep the quality of search results without use of nofollow? How would you deal with spam with no ability to convert literally *all* websites in the World Wide Web to that *link or don’t link* statement, with no chance to keep an eye on all these nasty scripts running through the web filling up the forms?
@Asuka: I am afraid that I don’t have enough data to come up with a reasonable conclusion — from what do I know I can only say that your assumption relating PR to site updates seems to be very likely. Actually, testing it out would be quite difficult to put over without a larger number of websites that *suddenly* switched from frequent updates to no updates at all. PR export frequency and all other PR factors would be only one another problem here, so I guess that giving up on complex research I’d be satisfied with the assumptions alone.
Jan at March 19th, 2009
@Bart: I am not sure, but nofollow links still DO count. I’ve seen plenty of such links in my google webmaster tools account. And wonder or not, these links carry some weight! I tested it and you can do it too.
And how about forms that can’t handle spam properly? You already answered the question. Fight spam, not links. When I run a website that is powerless against spam, then such a website has no place under the sun! On my websites I’ve been receiving plenty of spammy comments – without links. But they’re still spam. Did I approve or decline such comments? Naturally, they didn’t become published. Easy as pie. Control every form and spam has NO chance.
Jan at March 19th, 2009
My apologies… I just want to add. Have you all who like that fuc*ing nofollow thing ever checked backlinks.com for instance? Real spammers can buy links for peanuts. And these links aren’t marked as nofollow. Of course, they come from spammy sites… But that’s another story. I just wanted to mention that links buying is supported by spammers! And nofollow plays no role in this! Almost every webmaster would sell a link for $100 or $200 per month. Just because it’s easy money. Of course, I know that such links (and even more expensive) are being sold. Not once, not twice, but thousands of times each month. More times than you can ever imagine…
So the question is still… to link or not to link.
Bart at March 19th, 2009
Nofollow does not carry any weight that would matter for ranking calculation — that’s what has been tested, and that’s what has been proclaimed officially.
When I run a website that is powerless against spam, then such a website has no place under the sun!
Yes, but only partially. If you run a website that is powerless against spam, it’s just a matter of time when spammers will turn it into place with a rubbish look like, so your search algorithm can mark it as a *questionable source of reference*. The problem is, it will take an amount of time. Or maybe — if only a couple of fellows would notice the opportunity, the site could not get totally rubbish after all (here’s an example) — and have an influence on your search results! Since you can’t tell which of websites in your index face an issue like this — IMO use of nofollow seem to be the only reasonable way to go. And when I say “reasonable”, I mean the well-considered use (such as Reddit karma system which justifies whether the attribute should be added) — not the “black hole” way of adding rel=”nofollow” to all external references (such as Google, YouTube, Wikipedia).
Real spammers can buy links for peanuts. And these links aren’t marked as nofollow.
There’s a substantial difference between spam links and *paid* spam links — and it’s all about ROI. Spams of *the worst kind of spam* are not likely to make a profit with links brought for a meaningful amount of cash.
