Last July I added the dofollow to my blog (or more correctly removed the nofollow tag) but soon found people abusing it and I quickly turned nofollow back on.
Joining the “dofollow” movement for awhile I did certainly see an increase in comments but didn’t want to put up with moderating every comment because that’s a waste of time. Some people left great comments, others just a few words to get a link back. So instead of giving credit to useful commentators I punished everyone.
Now there is an answer to this dillema created by Lucia over at bigbucksblogger.com. She’s created a plugin that will allow dofollow on comments but conditionally and I like that a whole lot better then punishing everyone. So I’m once again in the dofollow movement but only under certain conditions… and they are:
You must have commented atleast 10 times for any of your comments to have the nofollow tag removed. The name you use in the name field must be shorter then 15 characters (this cuts out people leaving comments with a bunch of keywords in them). Trackbacks are not followed at all unless they have commented the same as mentioned above (this cuts out the trackback spammers).
When you leave a comment it will show a number next to your name indicating how many times you’ve commented in all.
I hope this encourages more discussion now, although I still have a problem with posting regularly and in a way that invites comments. I’m working on it!
What do you think?
I somehow came across your post while surfing through the internets this evening and like your thoughts on spam linking. With the conditional follow plugin, couldn’t you just use that with a comment filter plugin like Akismet. I mean, all the link spam I get are caught by the filter, but if people are commenting in ways that are adding to the conversation (even if just for the link) why is that a bad thing. I guess maybe I’m just in a different stage of my blogging life where I’m willing to take the abuse for the traffic.
Hi Jeff. we run dofollow with akismet (moderated) and don’t suffer unduly apart from the usual couple hundred from the bots every day.
personally i think ten posts is a little high if you’re trying to encourage much commenting, but its a funny thing really, people should ideally be commenting because they want to, not for a link anyway.
how’s it working out, have the comments picked up again since this?