A good linking policy is generally considered to be good practice, and implementing dofollow makes it very difficult to maintain.

As I’ve already mentioned, the potential snowball effect of many non relevant links on many posts could have a negative effect on your search engine positioning…

Also, I believe that if the dofollow movement gets enough momentum, Google might move against it as it skews results based on linking - worst case scenario Google move blogs out of the main search and into blog search as has been bandied about a few times.

And to go back to the lesser issues of maintenance, I posted a relevant link on a relevant post, and yet you seem concerned that I was taking advantage. This is not a concern you would have to be remotely worried about if you were using ‘nofollow’.

So all in all, I’m still not convinced, but this is a really interesting discussion!

There isn’t much more that I can add to what Andy, David and Cormac have said advocating Do Follow, other than it helps to build relative content on your blog when readers know that they’ll get some kind of reward for adding their input, especially when it’s a hot topic.

One thing that I would like to point out, is that you had taken slight advantage of posting a link back to this post in your comment with your cons against using it, on a post where I am rewarding those that ARE using it with links back to their sites, ahem.

Everyone has the freedom of choice, and there will always be pros and cons. But when the pros far outweight the cons, as I believe Do Follow does, then one might want to give it some consideration.

For a site that doesn’t monitor their comments closely, then it’s probably a good idea not to remove No Follow. I monitor all of my posts, so it’s not an issue for me. Those that leave a comment just for the link without contributing anything but ‘good post’ can be easily deleted.

As mentioned, there are plugins and filters that you can add that will catch the majority of spam, and you can control who is allowed to receive links back after so many comments.

Meant to say I read the article you linked to and that concept of increasing internal linking in relation to number of incoming links was interesting.

I couldn’t give you an improvement, because over the last 2 years I have been using Dofollow on every Wordpress installation I have that has comments switched on.

Whilst I encourage people to use DoFollow, I also try to provide information on how to balance internal and external linking.

On this blog, as it is currently setup, I would advise you not to use DoFollow, but at the same time I would say you don’t have enough relevant internal linking.

But that is me thinking the way I do for SEOing a blog which is being used for personal communication or discussion, and not a niche website. Niche websites I sometimes do differently, with all juice flowing to a sitemap, and from there to the content - such sites I generally don’t have comments switched on, unless there is a product in some way to support or pre-sell.

It increases the management overhead and risks getting a lower search engine ranking for the page if not managed very carefully.

I think that there are cases where dofollowing makes sense, but it’s not something I would generally advocate, nor is it something I’ll be implementing myself - not just yet anyway.

As I said on another blog, Google treats a link to a site as a favourable nod - as the author of a site I wish to remain in absolute control of the direction of those favourable nods.

And I think that makes sense. When Google is spidering my site and deciding relevance, I want to be in total control of that. And I don’t want to have to remove a valid comment due to a link I feel is irrelevant…

Of course, if you notice any improvement in your search engine rankings as a result of dofollowing from your own site, I’ll sit up, pay attention and apologise for ever doubting you

It fluctuates a little (ok sometimes a lot), but last time I checked Google likes me and has over 4K of my pages indexed, and only 3 in supplemental.

Use a comments policy and enforce it. (I need to remove a couple of links from some comments I received today)

Also note that a link that is someone’s name, linking through to a blog that is about them, is not an irrelevant link, though some people could use it a little smarter and link through to related content.

As an example I have used my link above to link through to some highly relevant content on how you can control links on a page that gets lots of comments.

The biggest problem currently are the people running around leaving comments just because it is a link, on blogs they wouldn’t think of reading other than for the link.

My hope is that eventually people will start using the benefit of DoFollow with trackbacks, linking from relevant content to relevant content, and effectively being able to choose your anchor text.
Obviously legitimate trackbacks, not spam.

For business blogs, who are particularly interested in improving search engine results I would have to say I would be extremely wary of ‘dofollowing’ though.

Quite a few people seem to be joining the move to dofollow, it will be interesting to see how it turns out, what the impacts are and, if enough people abandon nofollow, whether Google responds in any way.

I’m all for removing NoFollow to promote conversation. Sure, there may be those who are in it for themselves when leaving comments, but more often than not the comments I receive are constructive.

Plus, by encouraging new visitors to comment they’re flagging up their own blog which could well be of great interest to me. After all, they’re visiting my blog due to its content, so chances are they’re posting about something similar.

Thanks for visiting.

David

There are dangers in linking to bad neighborhoods which can result in your site dropping out of the index. Obvously this is a nightmare for any blog and more so for a business blog. I still believe that the link love plugin goes a long way to building trust though. I must install that plugin myself when I get a chance. At the moment I’m dofollowing all comments. I believe in Karma so I should really be controlling my links a bit better I suppose.