Lately I’ve been working on Wealth and Wisdom a lot. Some of it was to improve our interface. A lot of it is to grow our subscriber base.

One area we have been working on is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As I’ve implemented several things one thing jumps out at me…

Most blogs use nofollow tags on their comments

Of the 15 or 20 blogs I checked, only one had comments that didn’t use nofollow tags (thanks Pat, we appreciate it).

Nofollow tags prevent the search engines from following the link. The link owner gets no credit for it and it doesn’t contribute to their search engine ranking. While this effectively eliminates the spam issue it punishes legitimate commenters. One big reason people comment is for the link juice.

The spam problem

I understand why the search engines and the blogging platforms make this their default setting. Comment spam is a major issue. While spam filters like Akismet do a great job with obvious spam, the subtle spam comments get through.

What do I mean by subtle? It’s the comment that is generic and complementary. “Great blog. I just came across you and will be adding you to my reading list.”

These comments are harder to find. I had a bunch sprinkled through my blog and had to go back and delete them. How do you know when it’s spam and not just a complement? Copy the comment and paste it into google search. If you come up with hundreds (or hundreds of thousands) of results, the comment is spam. Report it!

Take a stand

We bloggers need to take a stand. Take back your blog. The answer to comment spam is vigilance by bloggers, not  by indiscriminant nofollow tag use.

At Wealth and Wisdom we proudly use follow tags on all our comments. If your comment contributes to our community you will get full search engine credit.

I’m calling on all bloggers to do the same. It’s easy to do. If you use wordpress there are several plugins to allow follow tags. I personally use Nofollow Case by Case, but there are several others that are highly rated.