I’ve just installed the Do Follow Trackback and Do Follow Comments plugins so now the links in your comments and trackbacks will be stalked followed by Google and any other search engine or service that know about the rel='nofollow' link attribute.
It’s not a completely free lunch though. Any spam comments will be deleted, legitimate comments with spammy urls will have their URLs mangled. Check out this comment and this one. Those _ characters in the urls make them pretty useless.
There are 7,457 comments on over 4,500 posts here. That’s a lot of URLs to get some PR loving.
The change is active here on Holy Shmoly! and In Photos dot org.
Well done for using DoFollow – I’ve done the same on my blog, to help share a little GoogleJuice 🙂
DoFollow has a handy option to only remove the nofollow from links that are over a certain age – so you can set it so that only comments added over, say, 3 days ago get the nofollow removed. That way, if a spam comment slips through, they still don’t get followed by Google for 3 days, which is plenty of time to remove it.
That’s a good idea, but I have moderation enabled for new users. Spam rarely gets through thankfully.
It’ll be interesting to see if my posts receive more comments in the future. I doubt it’ll make a difference. It certainly doesn’t encourage me to write a comment on a blog post.
Cool idea – I wonder when anything like that might happen to blogs.linux.ie 😉
Good stuff Donncha, I have added your blog to the list of Irish blogs I have amassed which are dofollowing comments.
Well done. Now we just need to get rid of NoFollow from WordPress altogether. It was destined to be a poor solution and should be used in a purposeful way rather than app-wide.
Its a nice concept, but it also leads to increased ’spam’ with comments like ‘Good Job’ or ‘Nice blog’ that are not actually relevant to the post, but are just there because the poster saw a ‘DoFollow’ badge on the blog and wanted a backlink.
I suppose you could call this a double edged sword, it’d definitely get your more comments, but also increase your moderation work.