Again, this blog post is intended for those who are already blogging and for those planning to blog among my readers. The subject is an old issue among bloggers but being a newbie on blogging who wants to inform and be informed, I decided to write about the NoFollow link attribute (rel=”nofollow”) which was originally created to block search engines from following links in blog comments to minimize if not totally eliminate the amount of blog comment spamming.
In my research on the subject, I saw that the issue that Google worked on and gotten support from practically all blog platform developers way back in 2005 was hot until 2007 when negative opinions about the anti-spam effectiveness of NoFollow link attribute on blog comments came in loud and gained followers among bloggers who turned their backs and implemented the DoFollow rule.
I also noted the reservation of some bloggers to implement DoFollow link attribute on their readers’ comments was due to fear of getting their PageRanks to suffer reductions (PR leak) because of links on spam comments by lower ranked sites of their commenters. However, such fear of PR leak due to spam comments could be easily contravened by using effective spam filters and doing 100% moderation of blog comments.
In the old articles that I read, it was believed that some bloggers who write contents on their sites and make comments on others’ work may not even know that the links on the comments they make are of nofollow attribute and therefore useless in their efforts to build-up backlinks to their sites. Most people in the blogosphere agree that this is unfair to those who give serious and worthwhile comments.
Knowing the above arguments and the fact that the WordPress platform that I use for this site is by default has nofollow attribute on any link that can be found on my readers’ comments, I researched for a suitable plugin that would make the comment links on my blogs dofollow. Towards this end, I found NoFollow Free (NFF) plugin the most suitable for the purpose. The NFF plugin is very easy to install and set-up with the following features:
* replace nofollow on author/text link (ON/OFF)
* replace nofollow on registered author/text link (ON/OFF)
* replace nofollow only if the visitor or the registered users had preset number of previous comments
* put back nofollow if blacklist words are matched
* display number of comments by author
It is also believed that a DoFollow link attribute for comments in a blog would encourage more readers who will toil to make useful comments. I could just hope that this will be true to my blogs here.
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