Pros and cons of no-follow and do-follow

[Laughing Ninja]

which is your blog and why?

[ChickenFreak]

Nofollow. Dofollow blogs attract spam comments. And I more or less disapprove of the whole concept of dofollow - if absolutely anyone can plop a link on your site, so that you're "vouching" for any site, good or bad, then what's the point?

[Melody]

My blog is no follow. I'm more interested in quality comments where people are participating in blog because they like the community. I have zero interested in drive-by spam where people write things that sound like comments (or not!) but really they're just hoping for a little link-juice and will never be back. Quality over quantity.

[alantay]

As an administrator, managing a dofollow blog is tough if traffic is there. This is because you give a dofollow link back there and everyone wants to comment

My blog is dofollow

[TobyAletha]

in my blog comments are simply off, because I have a commercial blog =) but I just want add that people spam and nofollow blogs too))

[Melody]

Originally Posted by TobyAletha

in my blog comments are simply off, because I have a commercial blog =) but I just want add that people spam and nofollow blogs too))

So true and the Akismet plug in catches 95% of it.

[Laughing Ninja]

So just to make sure I understand, the main problem is that it attracts spammers? I don't think I would mind sifting through that just because my blogs get so little traffic still. I understand though, that if I ever start getting more traffic it will be a bigger burden. I know of several blogs and forums that have switched from do-follow to not for that reason, but for now I don't think it will be a huge problem if I were to go do-follow.

Likewise, another problem is that it promotes quantity over quality? Isn't the "quantity", or at least the frequency of comments, good for SEO? Wouldn't it indirectly attract some quality just as any SEO effort does (ideally)?

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by Laughing Ninja

So just to make sure I understand, the main problem is that it attracts spammers? I don't think I would mind sifting through that just because my blogs get so little traffic still. I understand though, that if I ever start getting more traffic it will be a bigger burden. I know of several blogs and forums that have switched from do-follow to not for that reason, but for now I don't think it will be a huge problem if I were to go do-follow.

Likewise, another problem is that it promotes quantity over quality? Isn't the "quantity", or at least the frequency of comments, good for SEO? Wouldn't it indirectly attract some quality just as any SEO effort does (ideally)?

Well, spam comments are essentially worthless - they don't represent real humans reading the blog; they're written by robots. Even an infinite number or robots won't lead to any "quality", because they're not human. The few humans who are bothering to spam by hand are still just spamming to spam; they're not going to read your blog.

And humans who go to your blog, see a non-zero comment number, go to look at the comments, and see that they're all spam... aren't going to comment either.

And I'm sure that Google knows all this, so I'd think that spam comments on your blog wouldn't be good for SEO.

And they would annoy your _real_ readers.

I think that in general, a strategy designed to try to attract robots or spammers is a strategy doomed to failure. You want to attract human readers.

[Melody]

Originally Posted by Laughing Ninja

So just to make sure I understand, the main problem is that it attracts spammers? I don't think I would mind sifting through that just because my blogs get so little traffic still. I understand though, that if I ever start getting more traffic it will be a bigger burden. I know of several blogs and forums that have switched from do-follow to not for that reason, but for now I don't think it will be a huge problem if I were to go do-follow.

Likewise, another problem is that it promotes quantity over quality? Isn't the "quantity", or at least the frequency of comments, good for SEO? Wouldn't it indirectly attract some quality just as any SEO effort does (ideally)?

The other risk of going with a "do follow" blog could be its affect on Page Rank. Now I am definitely not an expert on this, but my own blog is a PR4, and at this point I'd never use my own blog to "test" this theory.

PR increases with blogs point TO you. The theory is that if your blog is do follow then you are suddenly "vouching" for all those comments in the eyes of Google - In other words, you are sending your PR OUT not in. I've heard people say that turning a no follow blog into a do follow blog can quickly cause PR to fall a notch (when google updates).

On the other hand, I've seen plenty of blogs that are pretty successful at only a PR 1 or 2, so who knows how important that really is.

But it's not an experiment I'd ever try!

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by Melody

The other risk of going with a "do follow" blog could be its affect on Page Rank.

If I were queen at Google, I'd consider dofollow status to be a "points off" factor. A blog that is willing to "vouch" for everyone, no questions asked, seems like a blog that doesn't value its own opinion all that highly. I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of high-quality dofollow blogs, but I think that it is at least a slight negative.

And, again, if I were queen at Google, I would give outgoing links from the comments sections of dofollow blogs no credence whatsoever.