Nofollow Comments and Wordpress

Posted on 20. Dec, 2009 by JulieP in Wordpress Tips

When a small business installs Wordpress on their web host, one of the very first things I suggest they do is install a plugin called “dofollow”.

There is a whole lot of “hoo-hah” on the web about nofollow comments – so what is it all about?

In essence, “nofollow” was supposed to be a means of preventing spam comments affecting Google’s rankings. Basically, if a blog has “nofollow” set on their comments, it means that if I were to leave a comment and link back to my website, Google will theoretically not “count” that link when working out the page rank for my website page.

Why is this important?

Page rank is (again theoretically!) supposed to be one of the parameters in the calculation Google uses to determine where your website is placed in their search listings.

The better the page rank, the more highly Google rates your content, so your website page should (theoretically!) be listed higher in Google’s listings. So if I am choosing places to spend my time and leave comments in a manner which is going to increase my own website’s ranking, I will obviously choose somewhere my links are counted.

Why all the “theoreticals”?

Well, all of this is theory. Google’s calculations (algorithms) are very closely guarded. No-one really knows exactly how it all works.

Some very experienced people therefore make “educated guesses” when looking at the results.

But – not all may be what it seems!

I have seen nofollow comment links show up in places where it would indicate they ARE counted.

Small Business Websites Should TURN OFF nofollow

In any case, for our purpose (small business websites), the reason to use turn off nofollow is different and really important.

Small business websites should be encouraging as much interaction as possible from their website visitors. One way of doing this is to set comments to “dofollow”.

Spam can be controlled using Akismet (a plugin which comes with every Wordpress installation) and moderation.

Having a website which encourages more people to comment is great! If you haven’t already worked this out – Google loves fresh content.

Guess what comments are?

Fresh content – that you haven’t had to create yourself!

Encourage your website visitors to leave comments – good and bad! – on all your updates.

And definitely install the plugin called “dofollow”.