Search Engine Juice
No one likes spam. Unfortunately it has been a growing problem. One area that has been especially bad is comment spam on blogs. Most bloggers use a spam filter like Akismet to get rid of the obvious comments. It’s the subtle ones that slip through. Most of the time they look like lukewarm and generic complements. For example, “Great blog design. I just stumbled upon you and will have to add you to my reading list.”
The problem is that these are generated by programs that dump the comments on thousands of blogs. Yep, it’s spam.
nofollow tags were adopted by the major search engines and the major blog platforms as a way to combat spam. The way they work is that a nofollow tag is added to outgoing links. This tells the search engines that they should not follow the link. The end result is that the other end of the link doesn’t get visited by the search engine. As a result they lose any credit – or juice – the link would have brought.
When you are building a website you have control of this tag. That way you can link to a site and determine if you want search enginer juice to flow to the recipient. The challenge for bloggers is that most blogging platforms mark all comment links as nofollow.
Your comments should first support the community
I do want to make it clear that I believe someone should only comment to add to the community. Anything else is spam! That being said, one major side benefit is the search engine credit you get from the link. If you remove this you remove a major incentive for your readers to contribute!
Wealth and Wisdom proudly uses dofollow tags
That means you get full credit for your comments. I also am calling on all bloggers to do the same. It is pretty easy to do (I can only speak for a WordPress blog). There are several plugins that are easy to add and configure. The one I chose was Nofollow Case by Case. Why did I chose it? It met my needs better than the others. I liked that it made dofollow the standard but made it easy to mark links nofollow on a case by case basis.
I also added nodofollow to Firefox. It allows me to see if a site uses nodofollow tags easily.
As I said earlier I can only speak for WordPress blogs. I’d love it if someone from other blog platforms researched this. Let me know how to make those blogs dofollow and I’ll share your findings with Wealth and Wisdom readers (and give you full credit with a dofollow link!).
