Most WordPress blogs come with the rel=’nofollow’ tag. This means that when your leave your comment and your link is displayed in your name you don’t receive a precious backlink. Lately I’ve been thinking about removing this the rel=’nofollow’ tag as a kind of reward to people who can actually be bothered to comment on my posts. I guess having rel=’nofollow’ can be useful, a lot of spammers now know that nearly all blogs will not give you a backlink when they spam your comment sections with links to Viagra sites. It also show that people are genuinely interested in what I have to say.
The big downside will be people leaving stupid comments just to gain a backlink. If I was to remove ‘nofollow’ I’d have to be make sure people weren’t just taking advantage of me. I could use a plugin that will only give you a backlink when you’ve posted 10 comments. Of course, all of the comments will have to be relevant to the topic, offering genuine ideas and thoughts. Like I said, removing ‘nofollow’ will be a nice reward to all the people who regularly visit my blog and share their opinions on my posts. Before I remove it, I’ll be doing a bit of research and I’ll be contacting other blog owners who have it removed. I want to see if it will actually benefit my make money blogging blog.
Have you removed it? Has it improved your readership?
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May 28th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Honestly, that’s a really good idea. I think people would be even more willing to post a comment of a blog that they read (if they are a blogger) if they get a backlink. Why not do that? You’re adding incentive to your readers to comment and be a part ot the discussion, and in the end they get rewarded too.
Why not do that? Obviously the spam posts suck, but if you require a 1 time approval, you can stop all those from ever showing up and still allow your loyal readers to post and have their comments show up immediately (after their initial post of course).
I really don’t see any negatives to giving backlinks.
May 28th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Hey Mr Pappagiorgio, thanks for your opinion. The whole point of a blog is to let people comment on your thoughts and opinions. If giving backlinks is going to improve the conversation around here I think I’ll be removing the tag.