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phanio
07-19-2009, 12:24 PM
Just read a blog post that I don't really understand. It seems that many are trying to figure out how google is ranking or penalizing dofollow comments.

Here is the post: WordPress Comment SEO Solutions (http://andybeard.eu/2065/wordpress-comment-seo.html?dsq=12921419#comment-12921419)

Would love to hear your explaination of what is happening here and your thoughts on the future.

vangogh
07-19-2009, 02:05 PM
First let me say you're going to be fine just leaving comments the way they are and not worrying too much about this.

Here's a little quick history on what's happening. Years ago Google got together with blog application developers and implemented the nofollow value on the rel attribute of the link tag. (That's a mouthful). The idea was that it reduce spam comments on blogs as the link wouldn't help at all in search ranking and spammers would have no incentive to leave spam comments.

In that regard it failed miserably. Comment spam increased if anything. Google though started changing what nofollow was about, but that's a story for another day.

Another concept site owners have been working on for years is something called PR sculpting. Imagine you have a web page with a PageRank of 2. And imagine that page gas only 4 links on it pointing to other pages on your site. In theory each of those links passes 2/4 or 0.5 PR to each of the pages you're linking to.

Now let's say you blocked the flow of PageRank through 2 of those links. Ignore the details of how for a moment. Now you have PR2/2 links so each link sends 1.0 PR to the pages on the other ends of those links.

When you look at your site there are likely pages that really don't benefit you much by ranking well. A privacy policy page for example. It's not all that likely someone who finds that page in a search engine is going to become a customer. A login page might be another example. So why try to get PR to flow into them. If you can redirect the PageRank from your privacy policy to a sales page in theory you help an important page rank at the expense of another page which you don't care if it ranks.

In years past webmasters used all sorts of methods to sculpt PR. JavaScript was a popular way since search engines couldn't read links coded inside JavaScript and thus not see some links. Nofollow essentially did the same thing and it was very easy to implement. And even more Google gave every indication that was an acceptable and good use of nofollow.

A few weeks (a month?) ago we learned that Google had changed how they treated nofollow. If you had those same 4 links on a page and 2 of them were nofollowed you would expect the 2 remaining links each passed 1.0 PR. Not anymore. Now those 2 links would pass the same 0.5 PR you'd expect if all 4 links were passing PR. Instead of being able to redirect the flow of PR you would just lose it on the nofollowed links.

One more issue. While you generally aren't going to lose ranking because less than reputable sites link to you, you can lose rank if you link out to less than reputable sites. Nofollow should have taken care of that issue by saying I'm linking to this page, but I'm not endorsing it. If you were take the nofollow off all your comments then you might be sending links to sites that could be less than reputable since anyone can add a comment.

All of the above now encourages not linking out as much to other sites. More links means less PR flowing through each link and most people would rather not give that PR away if less links means more PR staying within the site and hence better ranking overall for that site. Nofollow was a nice way to keep PR, while still being able to link out.

With blog posts, especially those that get a lot of comments you're not giving away a lot of PR that you otherwise kept. Nofollow no longer helps keep the PR in site and taking it off could mean linking out to 'bad neighborhood' sites. Again you're being encouraged not to allow links in comments or not allow comments at all.

The post you linked to above is looking for solutions and looks to a plugin that may provide a partial solution to the whole problem.

But again you probably don't need to worry about any of this. You can leave WordPress as is, nofollowing comment links like the many thousands of other WordPress blogs. This is more advanced stuff and you should know what you're doing before trying to implement this stuff. If the plugin proves to be a good solution then you can install it. For now I'd say the jury is still out.

With SEO, unless you really know you're stuff, you're best not to try to micromanage every little thing. I think a lot of people cause themselves more harm than good by agonizing over every little detail when most have limited impact. Even before all the recent changes many people have been arguing that PR sculpting didn't work in the first place or that if it did work the benefit was mainly for very large multi-thousand page sites.

Harold Mansfield
07-20-2009, 07:19 PM
My personal ( and technical) feeling is to leave your blog "no follow". You have to think of it very simply...Do the majority of your readers have blogs and websites ? Are you targeting webmasters ?

If no, then don't worry about it. The average Joe has no idea if your blog is "do follow" or not, nor do they care. They are leaving comments to express themselves and participate. Those are the kind of comments you want.

The main thing that having a "do follow" blog does, is encourage other webmasters and bloggers to leave comments just for a backlink, no matter how hard they try to make them appear as if they are generally interested in what you have written...it's still spam.