I guess a lot of people still don’t realize that Google has essentially nullified the usefulness of the No Follow tag for comments. There simply isn’t the incentive to use it anymore because of the way that PageRank is affected.
It used to be that you could put the No Follow tag on certain kinds of links on your website in an effort to sculpt or conserve PageRank. That has changed now though. Google makes the No Follow links still consume outbound PageRank. Let me explain further.
Each page on your blog has a certain amount of PageRank that can be represented on a scale of 0 to 10. Most blog pages have a PR of near zero. On the toolbar it will show zero, but we all know that each page has some nominal PageRank value that is less than 1. Those pages are displayed as having zero PageRank according to the Google toolbar.
Pages acquire more PR from other pages that link to them assuming that those are normal links. If those links are No Follow, then no PR is passed through the link. It has been argued that if a link is not passing any PR, then that link is not passing any ranking power to the destination page. This is both true and untrue. I believe it is true that a normal link passes more ranking power than a No Followed link.
The amount of PR juice that is passed to other pages is divided by the number of outbound links on that page. So if you had 3 outbound links on a page, each link would only be passing 1/3 of its total potential. This used to apply only to Do Follow links. If you had 2 No Follow links and 1 Do follow link, then the Do Follow link would be passing 100% of the juice.
People used to put No Follow on some outbound links so that as much PR as possible was conserved for passing to other pages. You could control how much of this PageRank was spread across your website.
Google changed that though. They made No Follow links consume voting power even though they don’t pass any. Google changed their formula so that No Follow links reduce the power of the other outbound links. That means that you are no longer conserving or sculpting your PageRank. In Google’s eyes, all links cause the same drop in outbound PageRank.
So now it is essentially useless to use that No Follow tag. Some people think it reduces the amount of spam comments that people will try to get approved. My observation is that it helps a little bit. However, it also discourages people who want to comment on your site for the extra PR for their site.
When I launch a new blog I am always looking for places where I can contribute so that I can earn links back to my blog. This contribution could be from guest posting or it could just be from leaving comments on your posts. I always put comments that are on topic and thoughtful. I also check to see if you are using No Follow on your comments though. If you are using No Follow, then I am going to skip your blog. I am unlikely to ever come back to it.
If however, your site uses normal links for comments, then I will add your site to a list of sites that I keep. You can bet that I will be back multiple times to visit your site. I will read more of your posts and be an active contributor. I also like to help promote those kinds of blogs that I find. That means I am going to bookmark your better posts using my accounts at the major social bookmarking and voting sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and others.
So if you are looking to grow your blog and get as much traffic as possible, then I suggest you make sure your comments follow properly. I also suggest you use some other plugins to reward commentators like me. I like to use the Commentluv plugin. I also like sites that use the Top Commentators plugin. Both of those tools encourage people to visit and leave comments. Your blog gets more traffic as a result. Isn’t more traffic what you are really after anyways?
I can hear you saying “I don’t want to encourage spamming.” Well, neither do I. But, I can assure you that as long as you allow any comments at all, you are most certainly going to get your fair share of spammers. You are far better off installing some anti-spam tools like Akismet and CAPTCHAs. I use Akismet for WordPress and it works like a charm. It catches the vast majority of total spam. I also edit my comment policy to let people know what standards they have to live up to in order to get comments approved. If you don’t want comments with grammatical errors then say so. Tell people that all grammatically incorrect comments will be deleted.
I think that the No Follow tag has outlived its real usefulness. I think it is time we put it back into the closet where it belongs for the most part. Use it only when you absolutely don’t want to give someone all the juice for a good reason. If they aren’t worthy of getting all the juice, then they probably aren’t worthy of getting any links at all. Don’t you think?
*****Added additional information: I am sorry I did not clarify that this change in Google was actually made quite some time ago. I think it was over 2 years ago that they put the nofollow change into place. I just mentioned it because so few people realize that this change was made. You wouldn’t know about it unless you follow Matt Cutts. I know a lot of people don’t. His post that talks about it is titled PageRank Sculpting.
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Thanks Kathy
I really like this post, it really underlines the importance of do Follow and no follow links . I better get the right Plugin if kathy visits My blog !.
Pingback: Today adding do follow | Karl's Internet Marketing Blog
Thanks for the plug Karl.
Nice post, Kathy…
I am using the do follow wordpress plugin, but still my site contains the no follow attribute. Any idea what is the reason?
Looks like you fixed it. The nofollow tag is not there, at least it wasn’t when I checked.
Great post Kathy. I am a huge DoFollow fanatic. The purpose of nofollow should be to help google move around your site optimally, and to keep your pages that you don’t want to rank out of the index.
Everybody should get a DoFollow plugin, CommentLuv, etc for their blog so we can all benefit.
I think most of people is scared by spam.
But Askimet is a better solution for preventing spam that use nofollow
I use Akismet and Captcha on my do follow blog and spam is almost non-existent.
Thank you for the history of the ‘do follow’ and ‘no follow’ tags. That’s very interesting how they were used in calculating PR.
How did you find out about Google’s change to the ranking system?
Curtis,
If you want to learn all about what changes Google implements, you need to start reading Matt Cutt’s blog.
That is where I read that nofollow was now consuming PR.
Matt Cutts is the head of the anti-spam team at Google. He talks about the best practices for getting ranked in Google. He talks about changes in Google after they have been implemented.
The really juicy stuff is in the comments where he responds to readers’ questions. You might not understand everything he talks about at first. If you visit it regularly and re-read some of the older posts, it will all become clear.
You will see that people bash him in his comments, but in reality, he is providing a hugely beneficial service for us by telling us all of that. He reveals little nuggets of information here and there that really clarifies things.
People need to remember that Google is not a government entity. They don’t have to be fair to webmasters at all. In fact, they could choose to be a total dick to you if they wanted to. That is their prerogative. If they want to remove your website from their index without telling you why; they have every right to do so. That is as it should be.
I’m not really sure if I understand this. So say you are serial commenter. That means that any time you leave a link to your blog or whatever, you decrease the amount of power that link has on the pages affected?
Mike,
You should submit a reinclusion request to Akismet as your comment automatically went to my spam folder. That means someone has previously tagged you as a spammer. You left a decent comment for me. So, I dug you out of there. If you are wondering why your comments are not getting approved very often, that is probably why.
To answer your question: Every time you leave a comment another blog and it get’s approved, you have a link pointing back to your website. That link passes juice to your website because search engines see links as votes. If that other person’s page gets more juice (maybe you or someone else bookmarked it with a social bookmarking account), then even more juice gets passed through your link over to your website.
When I allow you guys to leave links in my comments, my page loses a little power through each of those outbound links. That leaves less PR to be spread around the rest of my website. Therefore my website PR will actually decrease somewhat. That is the tradeoff I am willing to accept. I accept it because I like the extra traffic to my blog and because I like to converse with other people through these comments. This is also part of the reason that I only allow comments for a limited time. If I left the comments open indefinitely, I would eventually get hundreds of comments on each post.
Keep in mind that losing PR does not have any real affect on your page’s ability to rank well in Google or any other search engine. The PR is only a representation of how well linked your page is and how often the Googlebot visits it to check for updates. Having more PR helps you get other people’s pages to rank better, but it doesn’t help your own.
Thanks Kathy!
very informative article.
Just wondering if these changes made google is part of the so
called “Google caffeine”?
No Stephanie it is was not part of that update. Google starting making nofollow consumer PageRank about 2 years ago. The caffeine update was implemented in January 2010. It is already in effect. The article you referenced was old news. I don’t know why they just posted it this month. That information is six months old.
Kathy. Actually i also want to make my blog Dofollow. But i use discus in my commenting section and it’s not possible to make discus Dofollow. Is there any way to make it? Thanks
Alamin,
You should submit a reinclusion request to Akismet as your comment automatically went to my spam folder. That means someone has previously tagged you as a spammer. You left a decent comment for me. So, I dug you out of there.
If you are wondering why your comments are not getting approved very often, that is probably why.
I suggest your remove Disqus from your blog if you don’t like the options it offers. A lot of people will not bother creating an account there. They just leave. I find that Akismet catches dang near all the spam for me. The downside is that it also catches some legit comments like yours. You need to be careful to follow people’s comment policy if you are going to leave comments. If you get thrown into Akismet, you will be wasting countless hours leaving comments that rarely get published. A lot of people are using Akismet.
Great job, Kathy. It’s funny to me how we as marketers have adapted to the changes. We found ways to find DoFollow blogs, gave them more attention, and use them to affect rankings pretty successfully, yet so many just don’t get it.
Another nice post :)
Thanks Joey.
For you to make it in this business, you need to keep up with what is going on. Like you said, you have to adapt.
Kathy, nice explanation for non computer people like myself.
I have already sent an email to my IT person to check. We do have dofollow on but with the constant reprogramming and changing of codes, things get dropped or revert back because of WP or plugins. (We’re still in beta with constant changes.)
I even plan on giving links to other bloggers to help people find them easier. Yes, it probably will kill me on PR (my SEO already told me). I just think that in the long run (years out), it builds relationships which is more important than a rank.
Just to make sure you understand:
Giving links out does not hurt your ranking at all. In fact, if you are linking out to high quality high trust sites it actually can help ranking.
PageRank (PR) and search engine ranking are not the same thing. Linking out from your site will lower your site’s PR or Google PageRank. It will not lower your search engine ranking.
Actually by accepting comments on your blog you can actually end up ranking for more long tail traffic than you would otherwise. There is money in the long tail. Those people are buyers.
If you want to learn more about it read this article on Page Rank.
My blog is completely do-follow! Dofollow comments, dofollow commentluv, dofollow top commentators, etc! A fully dofollow blog!