Nobody likes to have to manually filter out spam from the comments section on their blog. This is why there was such an increased usage of the No Follow tag for blog comments. The thought was that spammers wouldn’t bother abusing the comments if they didn’t get any link juice from them. Plus people also wanted to conserve Google PageRank for their own pages instead of spreading it to the commenter websites. Both of these reasons have essentially been nullified though. Therefore, I recommend you make your blog comments Do Follow. Let me explain myself better.
If you are trying to combat spam on your blog, just making your comments No Follow is not going to accomplish this. You will still get a steady stream of really crappy spam comments. You will get sick and tired of people telling you how great your blog is just so you will approve their comment. Apparently, a lot of these spammers don’t care that it is No Follow or maybe they aren’t smart enough to know how to tell. Some of these spammers use automated bots to do their dirty work. The bots certainly don’t care whether or not your links flow PageRank.
If you really want to combat spam, then I suggest you implement a couple of the very useful tools out there for doing it. For the sake of this article I am going to assume that you use WordPress as a content management system for your blog. WordPress is by far the most popular. Fortunately some really smart people have created plugins for WordPress to assist us in our combat against spam. The most common one is the Akismet plugin. This plugin is exceptionally effective at filtering spam so you don’t have to. You will see your spam reduced by 99% just by using this one tool. I also recommend that you use some kind of CAPTCHA on your site. A CAPTCHA is a little puzzle that has to be solved before you can leave a comment. In my opinion though, the CAPTCHA is optional. Akismet is far superior.
The other primary reason people used the No Follow tag on their blog comments was so that they could save or sculpt their Google PageRank. Some time ago you used to be able to conserve extra PR for your own posts instead of spreading the juice around. Google has altered their PageRank formula to compensate for this now though. Now even No Follow links cause a page to reduce the amount of juice flowing through the Do Follow links on the same page. A No Follow link reduces the PR of a page just as much as a Do Follow link does. Therefore, this entire process of trying to conserve PR has been nullified. You are wasting your time trying to do it. The only way to conserve the PR is to not allow any links at all. You could also add more Do Follow links that point to other pages on your own site kind of like they do on Buzzle.com. That will also conserve PageRank.
By allowing comments on your blog and keeping them Do Follow, you are going to get more people to take part in your discussions. Some of these people will be there for the primary reason that they want to get a link from your site. So what? As long as they are contributing to the discussion it really shouldn’t matter. They will be helping your site add unique content as well as a freshness boost. Google loves pages that are fresh and pages that have more content. This helps your pages rank for more long tail keywords. Plus, as your website homepage gains Google PR, you can bet that the link builders of the world will start to take notice. You will get ever increasing amounts of traffic and hopefully ever increasing numbers of high quality comments that add to your site value. The extra traffic never hurt anyone either.
Hopefully you are beginning to see why you should allow comments to stay Do Follow. As long as we have effective tools to combat spam, there really is no other good reason for them not to remain Do Follow. To make your comments Do Follow, you can install a free WordPress plugin like SEM-Dofollow.
I also highly recommend the Commentluv plugin as a way to reward the other bloggers who visit your site and leave comments. Every time they leave a comment, they get a link back to their latest post.
I started using both Akismet and Commentluv on my site. So, if you are not a spammer and you want a little link juice, feel free to comment on this post or any other newer post on this site. You can even subscribe to my feed so that you are notified every time I write a new post. Then you can come get your comment juice.
Don’t be afraid to spread the link love. Just make sure you aren’t doing it for spammers.
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Very true. I mean, some folks like to make their site or leave their site to have this nofollow tag on the comment section. They believe that if they do that, spamming activity will decrease.
But, that is not the case, some spammers just don’t care if your blog is nofollow or dofollow. They just bombard your or our blog with those creepy comments. And one way to combat this is via spam filters that you mentioned.
Great post Kathy!
Saw your blog via sitesketch101.com comment section.
Disqus comment is a good plugin if you don’t want to get busy with spams . I used it for some time. I removed it simply because some of commentors don’t like it as much as i do.
note: I would appreaciate if you put ‘comment subscription plugin’ down there, because I always forget where I made comments. ;)
Sorry Shah,
I vote no for the comment subscription plugin.
I have been thinking of making my blog do follow, but the spam issue has been one of the primary reasons I have shied away from that. Having read this I might rethink my position. I had no idea that no-follow links bleed page rank. You learn something new everyday.
The whole Google Do Follow & No Follow thing has been a mess. First Matt Cutts said that Google was okay with PageRank sculpting. Then they went and made No Follow links consume PageRank even though they don’t pass any on to the link destination. In my opinion, that pretty much nullified the whole purpose behind No Follow. I might use it when I absolutely refuse to vouch for a link, but for the most part I figure why bother?
Kathy, nice post. I agree with you making a blog no follow does not accomplish combating spam. I think WordPress spam can only combatted by Anti-Spam plugins like Akismet. And the issue between Do follow and no follow is really confusing but yet I still like to keep my blog do follow to give some link love to my friends and follow bloggers.
I have even removed the website field from my blog comment field of both desktop theme and mobile theme due to many reasons.
Currently, Around 98% of my real blog visitors are not webmasters and they are not actually familiar with website field. So most of them are simply filling that field with yahoo.com or something and some are not even knowing the format for using it and so while they click submit button, the comment won’t be send. So some suggest me to remove it
Since I removed the website field, I can easily identify those spam comments which are missed by akistmet and other antispam systems.
Also I’m afraid to publish some comments with links to some blogs that are banned from google search. So to avoid this we must have enough time to check all these things.