Using do-follow to encourage reader participation and conversation
No nofollow / do-follow is a movement with the aim of eradicating no-follow on blog comments. Their motto is:
“Fight spam. Not blogs.”
It is important for new bloggers to join this movement in order to encourage reader participation.
What is no-follow?
No-follow is an attribute which can be applied to links as a way of saying, “I have not editorially vouched for this link”. It’s usage is as follows:
<a href="#" rel="nofollow">link</a>
It was initially brought in by Google to help fight spam in blog comments and in other UGC situations. On major blogs, or other large websites where hand pruning of comments/content is not feasible it can be a useful tool in the fight against spam.
How no-follow can hurt your blog
When you think about it, no one owes you a thing when it comes to your blog and your lucky if anyone reads/subscribes to it and even luckier if people comment on your posts.
In this respect you have to make the reading and commenting as rewarding as possible. Having no-follow on your comments may discourage people from commenting on your blog. It seems reasonable to pass on link juice to people who are adding value to your blog by commenting.
When your blog’s new or unknown you need to ‘lower the barrier to commenting’ as much as possible and removing no-follow is one way of doing it. It’s unlikely you will have so many comments that you can’t weed out any spam, and if you use askimet you’re unlikely to have any/much spam anyway.
Removing no-follow
Something I almost forgot to mention - no-follow is enabled in wordpress (and most other blogging platforms) by default!
There’s a handy plugin for wordpress called dofollow which removes the no-follow on all comments. I strongly recommend using it on new blogs.
Related Posts
- What every blogger should know about setting up and optimising their blog
- You should realise that Wordpress is not right for everything
- Purge your feeds so you can read the interesting things
- When is a blog not a blog?
September 13th, 2007 at 11:59 am
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September 14th, 2007 at 1:48 am
I agree. I use the DoFollow plugin on my blog. I also like the show top commentators plugin.
September 14th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Yeh I used top commentators once but it was at a time when I had very little commentators and it was a bit lame then.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Since my site is a portal, I really don’t care too much about comments. People are free to comment, and I will participate, but I’m not using comments to drive traffic.
I was actually advised to use nofollow. Was this bad advice? In your opinion, can using either no or do hurt serps and pagerank? Thanks
October 5th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
No follow isn’t going to hurt your position in the SERPs or PR and removing no follow is also unlikely to have any effect, however, what it does do is provide no reward for people who are contributing to your site - so in some sense there’s less reason for readers to participate in the conversation.
Having said that, I doubt many people have time to check if each comment they leave is no followed or not, so it probably doesn’t make a huge amount of difference either way.