Is a no follow comment section good or bad?
-
I have a photography blog that I'm really trying to promote solid commenting. What is everyone's opinion on nofollow vs do follow comments?
-
Correct. I double check all comments and follow them back to the owners site. If the owners site is spam I typically report it. So I think what you're saying is there isn't a downside providing your super diligent on monitoring the site...is that correct?
-
If you are going to make the comment links follow rather than no follow then there is a good chance that you will get heavily spammed. You mention you plan to delete spam but you may have to be very viligant and check often as I have seen blogs in the past that get tons of it per day and in the end it becomes a pain in the backside for the moderator and looks bad for genuine users of the site.
It may be worth trialling it rather than committing to it if that is possible with the set up of your site so if things do get too spammy you can quickly move to a nofollow approach.
-
Thanks for this feedback. I like to think the content is solid and getting good participation is key. I'm just trying to understand the SEO downside to allowing people to post comments with links to their sites or blogs. Keeping in mind my blog is a photography blog so people that comment typically have photography blogs or portfolios. I delete any and all spam. I guess my question is does this hurt your search ranking with Google?
-
I'm not sure if anyone has any solid data on this, and even if they did I think it would be so conditioned on many other factors that it wouldn't be much help.
The pro's of allowing dofollow links from commenters on your blog is obviously that it encourages people to get involved, and maybe they stick around and become part of the community. The downside is the spammers who will invade!
You can argue both sides...
If people are going to bother to comment with good quality comments which are useful to building a community, and for they themselves to be persuaded to stick around is going to require that you are creating great content. If the content is crappy then people won't bother crafting great replies. So if the quality is crappy and you allow dofollow then you'll get (other than the spammers...) people who are maybe nice but aren't really interested in your community, they just want a link.
if the content is great then do you need the dofollow to persuade people to comment?
On the flipside, if the content is pretty good maybe a dofollow link helps to push people over the edge and make them bother to write the comment... If the community is small you should be able to manage the spam.
At the end of the day - I think you need to test in your niche and see what happens... Good luck!
-
I would only make the comments dofollow if you are going to police them carefully and delete links to any poor quality or shady websites.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Community Consensus: Are These Good Links?
I recently used a firm to do 2 months of outreach as a test for quality of work. Their reporting process is monthly, which seems fair, but after the first month's report I was sorely disappointed with the targeted domains for links. Apparently, the firm decided to condense the two months of outreach in to 4 days, so by the time I was finally able to see the work, the "job is done." Again, extremely disappointed. The original SOW was to target set posts for outreach in month 1, review/adjust and move in to month 2. No dice. So, here I am now left with a list of sites that have been targeted for outreach, being told "they are quality sites." What do you think, am I missing something and these are truly good links? Below are just a very, very small sample of the outreach completed: http://www.vrml.k12.la.us/7th/homework/ss/student/addtional.htm http://healthyfoodsandmore.com/useful-links.php http://antique.vccc.com/links.htm http://cyberflapr.tripod.com/links.htm
Link Building | | The_Cheat_Sheet0 -
Could someone be sabataging my site by bad backlinks?
Hello, As I have said before I am new to SEO and especially new to this type of software. I am trialing MOZ, ahrefs and MajesticSEO. I just used the Site Explorer on ahrefs and it showed me that a bunch of backlinks was created today but I haven't engaged anyone in "SEO" for many months. Why would this be? See the image for a screenshot. yhpUxFv.png
Link Building | | infinart0 -
Sitewide links from affiliates. Good or bad?
We have 14 affiliate sites that have a sitewide banner linked to one of our pages. The banner link is "follow" and contains an alt text that includes a brand name and a keyword. Are these links harming us, or creating value? We were hit by Panda 2.0 - do you think it might be the reason?
Link Building | | imoney0 -
Is it bad to insert links to other sites and use bold on keywords?
Hi, This is a question I always had doubt about, and would be very grateful in to know your opinions. Is it bad to link to other sites? Can this causes problems to my blog? I frequently insert links in keywords, etc, for other sites. Many times, for sites greater than mine, and I heard from some people that this is bad. Is this correct? In last days, I have used, in some links, the atribute "nofollow". This is good, or not? In a case, for example, when linking to Wikipedia, is it good to use "nofollow"? And about keywords: I'm mostly using bold on them. Is it good, or not? This subject always makes me think. I would be very grateful for any help. 🙂
Link Building | | Andarilho0 -
Removal of "bad" incoming links
I have had my site registered for a long time (since January 1995) and in that time we have built a good number of incoming links. We have a vendor database that we expose as a service to our visitors, which numbers around 5,500. These sites vary dramatically from low-end, Mom-and-Pop type web sites (some ugly in the extreme :)) to nationwide, established vendors. Back in the day, we had the basic tactic to request a link to our site if the vendor wanted to be listed in our vendor database. We stopped that practice years ago but still have many sites linking to us. The quality of some of these sites is very poor. I want to come up with a strategy for dealing with these. To that end, some questions: How "costly", from an SEO perspective, is a poor quality site that links to our site? What metric(s) should be used to assess the quality of sites linking to us? If possible, for the aforementioned metric is there a "bar" we might try to hit? For example, would it be useful to request removal of links where <metric>is less than x? What is x?</metric> Given that we have thousands to assess, is there any report I can create to identify these sites? Is it generally preferred to have vendors link simply to our home page or is it more effectice to have them link to particular pages on our site (each vendor can generally be associated with a "topic" on our site). In short, I am willing to go through this process if there is real value in it. Thanks. Mark
Link Building | | MarkWill0 -
When good domain names go bad
We have created a website to distribute a niche product. About a year ago, another vendor decided to drop the product and did not renew their domain name. We tried to acquire the domain name, but a cyber squatter picked it up. The old domain name had a few decent back links, and there was probably some value to us with a 301, but the cyber squatter was asking $8,000 and we didn't even bother countering such an absurd figure. The old domain continued to rank reasonably well for one or our search terms, even though it was just one page of spammy links. Well, this week it appears that Google Panda may have finally killed it off. Which brings me to a couple of questions. 1. In addition to a simple Google search, is there a way to determine if Google has killed a domain? 2. Assuming that Google has indeed killed the domain, is there any value in trying to 301 the domain should it ever be released? Best,
Link Building | | ChristopherGlaeser
Christopher0 -
How to create a good pagination and titles for a forum
I have a subdomain forum in my website, for example: http://forum.mywebsite.com/, the point is that i'm not sure how to create the url pagination and title in the index of each category. Let's say that i have 10 categories, right, and i want to do the pagination for the index of each category. An example of a url for the category is: http://forum.mywebsite.com/category-one/, here i have the posts for this category i will present 10 for page, next when any user click to see the posts in the second page i have this url: http://forum.mywebsite.com/category-one/page1.html. Here is where i have the problem, the url for the pagination it is ok, but the problem will be the titles for the continues pages (page2.html, page3.html, etc), it can't be the same one of the first url. So what can i do to avoid the problem of same titles in differents urls or any solution whit out any trouble for the spider.
Link Building | | NorbertoMM0 -
Followed Links from random forums, is it worth?
I have a competitor that apeears first place in Google with a certain keyword, i explore their site, and they have a lots of forums poiting to their page. What they do is, just go to a random forum, comment some threat and they put the anchor in sig, with that keyword, linking to their page. Well, from what i read in SEOmoz articles, Google its no supose to penalyze this pages? Because thoose are pages (forums) that dont have nothing to do -subject- with the page that apears in first place? Its a good practise? Should i do the same (x2) to get the first place in google? (Sorry for my English) Thank you.
Link Building | | comercialroldao0