SEO Wordsmith

Nofollow tags are getting increased attention among web marketers.  Many budding entrepreneurs who might have spent hours marketing a site through comments may pull out there hair thinking, “You mean those comment links are worthless?”  Well, yes and no.  First off, the nofollow tag is a tag in the template which tells a search engine spider to not follow a link to the outbound website.  Click on “Page Source” and it will look like this:

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Your Website</a>

What this means is that the link will have no PR value, as it doesn’t appear as if the host blog is linking to the site.  Individual traffic can come to your site, but not spiders.

Why Nofollow Began

The original purpose of nofollow was to curb comment spam.  You can think of nofollow as the great experiment that didn’t work – because by no means does putting nofollow on a site detract from the amount of spam.  The reason is because comment spam is done by robots that may not differentiate between these tags.  The spam software just wants to lay down a link anywhere and everywhere.

Now people use nofollow to maintain their current page rank.  As I wrote in the last post, a back link to a site which uses bannable practices can bring down the PR of the blog.  Let’s take an obvious example: you’ve got a blog post.  Someone writes a comment with a link that leads to a link farm.  This appears to spiders that your blog is linkfarm-friendly.  You don’t want this.  Maybe the commenter links to a site which has nothing to do with the purpose of your site.  You also don’t want this.

So nofollow is a way to protect against malicious linkers and to retain the strength of your current outbound links and partnerships. There are two schools of thought to nofollow tags.

1. On the one hand, using nofollow can turn off prospective commenters.  It can decrease site interaction because people won’t want to spend the time commenting if the link has less value.  All promotional commenters aren’t necessarily bad and they can add free, sometimes-useful, web content to a post.
2. On the other hand, a nofollow tag will ensure that commenters won’t link to a sub-par site that reflects poorly on your site’s PR.

On the flipside, what if you’re one of the multitudes who’s trying to get the biggest bang out of your commenting buck?  If you’re concerned about spending a lot of time commenting on sites that have no PR value, you can use a Firefox dofollow plugin, which will reveal nofollow and dofollow tags.

At the same time, I would not obsess too much about dofollow because commenting on a highly-trafficked site that employs nofollow can still bring in targeted traffic and improve your brand.  The sites that get the most traffic are also the sites that employ nofollow because they get the most comments from spammers.  But you can still lead individual people to your site and that still has value – especially if it’s on a site that gets a lot of trafffic.

Should you use nofollow?  I would say no, unless your getting hundreds of comments a day, which isn’t the case for most sites.  Spam software can filter out the really egregious links.  And monitoring comments is not that labor intensive.  Given the fact that the tag could cut into the popularity of your blog and even your link partnerships if you use the tag site wide, it could have an overall negative effect on your PR, so you should think twice before using the tag.