There is a bit of a disconnect between what SEO gurus say, and the reality of blogs.  I don’t think it’s intentional, but it does exist.

SEO 101 says that a great way to build back links is to comment on other blogs that are relevant to your blog.  You get to have a backlink included with your name, Google picks that up, and over time, your Page Rank improves.  Here’s the disconnect: WordPress defaults to setting a “NoFollow” on Comment links.  Most blog owners either don’t know about it, or they never got around to removing the no follow.   That means that although other readers can click through to you blog, the search engine spiders will not follow that link back to you.  Even the big boys like ProBlogger use the nofollow block.

The reason WordPress sets comments to nofollow is simple; comment spam.  Some sites, especially porn sites will run programs that look for blogs that they can post comments that will allow the link back to their site.  So the simple solution is to stop all comment links.  Unfortunately, that punishes your readers who you are encouraging to participate on your blog.

I’m experimenting with removing the nofollow on my comments.  Links within the comment will still have a nofollow block on them, but not the signature.  That means you will be able to take advantage of the backlink potential of posting comments, just like the gurus promised.  If the spam becomes overwhelming, I may have to revert back, but for now, we’ll see how it goes.

The plugin I am using to make this happen is: remove-nofollow.zip. Just load it up, activate it in your Plugins menu, and the nofollows will be removed from your comment headers, while leaving the block on links within the comments.

I’ll keep you updated on how it works out.

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