Should You Use Dofollow?

One of the most debated topics among bloggers is whether or not you should “nofollow” links left in your blog’s comments. The nofollow tag makes a link worthless, so if it points to an iffy site you won’t get penalized by Google or one of the other search engines. In WordPress the default way of dealing with links in comments is to add the nofollow tag, but a plugin called dofollow strips that tag and makes the links pass link juice.

Why Use It?

Most bloggers, including myself, use Dofollow to give each commentator a bit of a reward. Some bloggers feel that giving away free content is enough of an incentive to comment, but others think bloggers should do something more.

Reasons Not To Use It

There’s one main reason not to use it - it can mess up your blog’s standings in the search engines. If someone who runs a site marked as a spam site leaves their URL, Google (and Yahoo, MSN, etc) will pick that up and may give you a bit of a penalty.

Another reason to not use it is you can lose control over how many outbound links are on your pages. Most blogs only get one or two comments a day, so it isn’t a big problem. But if you start getting 15+ comments a day, then it can become a pretty big problem. Each of those links will make every link on the page pass that much less link juice.

Does It Make A Difference?

A while back Lorelle wrote a post on The Blog Herald asking their readers if dofollow makes a difference in their decision to post a comment. The commentators almost unanimously agreed “nope”. In my comment I even went as far as saying I haven’t noticed any blogs that use it experience an increase in the number of comments.

I certainly don’t think it has made a different here.

Why Not Try It Out?

As with anything, try it out for yourself and see if it makes any difference. I use it here, and I certainly don’t plan on disabling it anytime soon unless I know for a fact it is causing issues.

Oh, by the way, if you’re looking for a button to show that you have nofollow disabled, I made some a while back.

Stay tuned for even more Back To The Basics posts.

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