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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another nice post :)

Just wondering if these changes made google is part of the so
called “Google caffeine”?

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.

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?

Everybody should get a DoFollow plugin, CommentLuv, etc for their blog so we can all benefit.

I am using the do follow wordpress plugin, but still my site contains the no follow attribute. Any idea what is the reason?

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 !.