Comments on: Putting nofollow back on links in comments

By: the_guv

the_guv — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:01:13 +0000

UPDATE!

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

.. must read from from June 15 2009.

By: the_guv

the_guv — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:36:11 +0000

Er, my typo? Here's what I read before this piece ..

By: the_guv

the_guv — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:34:17 +0000

hmmn, damn .. more confused than ever now. Top comments y'all. Not often I sub to cmts but sure will this thread.I want to reward commenters. And I want to improve my karma too! But with a young blog I can't afford to give away too much link juice, tho I don't think that's quite so big an issue for me yet. Er, is it?Joost, one year on, has your opinion changed? I read before this. And I can see why you had a change of heart. Was it me ;)Guess I'll look at Lucia's Linky Love and compare that with Hobo Custom Link Love now.Seems to me, for young growing blogs, this is one of those areas where you have to spend some time. IE, follow but sift for spam... ?

By: oyun

oyun — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:39:33 +0000

How to channel Pagerank no follow

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:11:57 +0000

Joost- Hmmm. . . I am not sure where I fall in on this subject. I used to be a hard advocate for dofollows, mainly to thank my commentors. However, over the years I have battled and battled comment spam.

Yet, I also recognize that I have received link juice to my blogs in dofollow blogs. As a blogger trying to build traffic and authority I see the benefit of commenting on others blogs.

I would be interested in seeing what happens when you create your new comment plugin. BTW, my vote on the name of your plugin is: "Die you evil spammer, DIE!"

Yes, I despise spammers!!!

Paul
twitter.com/paulwilson

By: Drew Stauffer

Drew Stauffer — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:38:01 +0000

I certainly don't blame you. Having a blog that doesn't have no-follow is bound to attract some excessive riff raff.

Hope you figure something out to keep the juice flowing. Good Luck.

By: Edie

Edie — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:14:51 +0000

Hello Joost,

your idea of new plugin looks really good.

Good luck.

By: edwin

edwin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:56:57 +0000

It is sad to hear, but personally (PR zero blog at the moment,just starting) i don't have on my follow blog much spamming comments. I didn't use a do follow plugin, just adjusted the PHP code to "follow".
I hope i can get listed in the future as a trusted commenter.
A nofollow link has to my opinion the same value as a follow link on a Non/Alcoholic PR page..(pagerank N/A)

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:55:03 +0000

"But search engines use nofollow links to build keyword domain for this link."

To Titles: What do you mean by this?

By: titles

titles — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:12:50 +0000

But search engines use nofollow links to build keyword domain for this link.

By: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:11:18 +0000

@Rex: nope they don't in 99.9% of the cases.

By: Rex

Rex — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:10:00 +0000

Do search engines give "link juice" to nofollow links?

Your link analysis tool illustrates that Yahoo includes nofollow links in the list of links they produce for a search query such as "linkdomain:URL".

By: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:31:16 +0000

@Matt: "but comments are no less juicy than links posted in the post itself assuming they are dofollow." Not true

There's such a thing as block level analysis, and posts in blogrolls and comments are devaluated.

By: Matt Livingston

Matt Livingston — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:02:02 +0000

@Bradley:
Alright, I understand where you are coming from I simply disagree. All links will have the same amount of juice on one page. You are right in that the juice depends on that page's PR, but comments are no less juicy than links posted in the post itself assuming they are dofollow. I could be wrong, but I really doubt Google's bot does an examination of the page to find out if dofollow links are in comments or not.

By: Sint

Sint — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:43:18 +0000

Sad to read that the spammers got what they deserved, putting nofollow on ALL comments. But if the amounts of spam were indeed that big, I can imagine your decision: it won't stop the spam itself, but it will stop passing valuable juice to those morons.
I'm looking forward to all your great new plans. If moderating your spam is such a huge job, why indeed not also 'moderate' the real comments and point out which commenters do deserve dofollow-links (hoping I will be one of those).

In the meantime I'm still wondering why Google does not speak out against commentspam in a clear way. What they did was introduce a nofollow-attribute that did not stop the spamming, but caused all comments on certain blogs to not pass linkjuice anymore.
I am a strong believer that Google (and search engines in general) should make it clear that comment spam is a problem for both search engines and webmasters. Both parties could help each other by for instance building an interface to report comment spammers (the same way you can report blackhat SEO).

By: Chloe

Chloe — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:41:17 +0000

To be king of google, you have 2 ways.

Spam your way to the top, or pay google.
Does money supermarket.com really have 600,000 legitimate links.. sure !

Google won't stop the spam because most people will never be able to get to the stop, so pay them through its advertising system.

Google only fear mongers about the spam, it has no real quarms with spammed sites sitting at the top of rankings for key terms which advertisers pay up to Â£1 per click on.

By: David LaFerney

David LaFerney — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:16:48 +0000

Too bad, but people are dogs sometimes.

I don't know If I would call it a problem exactly, but I've even noticed before on SEOmoz that sometimes people will comment like crazy to get up to that 100 point threshold for their profile link, and then they often chill out a bit.

PageRank has certainly brought out the greed in webmasters.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:16:29 +0000

Sure, it's just that some juice is weaker than other juice...

By: Chloe

Chloe — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:14:31 +0000

David, don't know quite where your coming from to be honest, one minute ur saying one thing, the next another.

Bottom line, google follows link that don't have nofollow, and so does the juice. End Of.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:32:04 +0000

@Matt, yes there is some juice squeezed out of a dofollow site, but it has to be only a tiny quantity not only be necessity of the structure of a page (comments and so spam links towards the bottom) likely to have blogroll and lots of other links (so dilute) but also in that the vast majority of blogs have very low pagerank and sub-pages represented by new posts are more often than not PR0 or at best PR3 or less.

It doesn't mean I'd let through spam comments even on my lowly sites, but it just seems to me that all the effort that goes into comment spamming could server the spammers better if it were redirected towards other endeavours.

Of course, targeting big, powerful blogs is a different matter.