I’ve made a decision today to spread the love a bit by making commenters links on my site ‘dofollow‘ rather than ‘nofollow‘. Well, basically it’s my way of saying thanks to people who take the time to post comments on my blog by passing on some ‘link juice‘ which will help thhem get a little higher in the search engine rankings.
The ‘link in question is where you put your website details when posting a comment as seen in the image here:
What’s the difference between dofollow and nofollow?
‘nofollow‘ was implemented by Google, Yahoo and MSN so that a blog would not pass on Page Rank (PR), link juice or link love as it’s sometimes called – to spam sites and Google also asked webmasters everywhere to put the nofollow tag on ‘paid links’ as well.
The ‘dofollow tag
The ‘dofollow’ isn’t really a tag, as in reality all that is required is to remove the ‘nofollow‘ tag from the code.
For e.g. those like me that have the Disqus commenting plugin installed on the wordpress blogs and want to share some link juice, you can make Disqus comments ‘dofollow‘ by looking at line 13 (approx) in the comments.php file within the plugin directory of your wordpress installation disqus-comment-system
wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/comments.php
and look for the following line and remove the bit I’ve highlighted in red:
<a id=”dsq-author-user-<?php echo $comment['id']; ?>” href=”<?php echo $comment['user']['url']; ?>” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”><?php echo $comment['user']['display_name']; ?></a>
Will I get an increase in spammers?
Maybe yes as there are sites that list blogs that have implemented ‘dofollow‘ but it’s easy enough to delete them and not that difficult to keep on top of in the grand scheme of things. Also, I moderate comments that contain any links within the comment post itself – so nothing get’s through.
Dofollow plugins
There are more and more plugins being written for site owners that are wanting to share some link love and CommentLuv is a really nice example and the wordpress plugin is available also – but it won’t work if you have Disqus installed – but I’ve shown you how to make Disqus ‘dofollow‘ above…
…And finally
I’m not the first to implement ‘dofollow’ and I certainly won’t be the last and you can expect to see an increase in blog and site owners doing the same as I believe it encourages commenting and growth of their online communities.
Related posts:
- Nofollow: Keeping control of your Page Rank
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Great tips for WP users, particularly Disqus comments (didn't realize how to do this). A great incentive to get more comments in a time pressed world
Askimet plugin should get rid of most of the spammers if it increases post implementation.
I am finding that people would much rather share via Facebook or Retweet rather than take time out to comment on blogs, what do you think?
Hello there,
There is something strange with this solution for Disqus dofollow. For example, here if I look at the source page, PRBristolblog, link from above, has no “nofollow” attached, but if I check the link here with tool like Firebug (addon for Firefox) that it has a rel=”nofollow” :
<a id=”dsq-author-user-53504061″ rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank” href=”….and so on.
I'm confused…
This post was exactly what I was looking for. Trying to modify my disqus comment system, but didn’t know where to start.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to whitelist bloggers I want to give dofollow and then have everyone else be nofollow. The reason I want to do this is to reward meaningful and intelligent discussions – rather than just blind please-I-need-links posting.
got any thoughts on how that could be done??
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