Occasionally readers may include a link to another site within the comment they leave on your blog. This might be for a number of reasons, for example:
- They would genuinely like you to visit their site.
- You are an authoritative website and in order for them to obtain a search ranking benefit, they want a connection with your site.
I’ve recently learnt (and want to learn more!) that the benefit of point two is that the Google search engine may then count this as if you have recommended their site and subsequently their page ranking goes up. Google have therefore created a rule which allows you to set up a ‘no follow’ tag to any hyperlinks that people leave.
Additional information
Wikipedia explain that that the reason for using ‘no follow’ is that “it is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results” and a hyperlink included within the comments “should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index”.
Digg.com have a post by marketverticlepartners.com in 2007, which states the following: “The ‘nofollow’ tag, when added to a link, prevents Google from counting the link as such a ‘recommendation’, thus not providing any search ranking benefits to the site being linked to”.
And lastly, Daniel Scocco on Daily Blog Tips has written an article called ‘Google Changed How It Handles Nofollow’ which is a little technical but might be worth a read.
My question to you
What I am confused about it how to set this up on comments left on WordPress blogs, or is it an automatic ‘no follow’? Does anyone know?
Hope you enjoyed today’s blog.
Until tomorrow…
Sandra
Freelance writer
www.sandramadeira.com
(For information on my services as a freelance writer as well as details of my book and other blogs).
This blog post forms part of My Writing Challenge.
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lol great sort of advice.
Posted by Hemendra Kumar Saini | November 28, 2011, 1:44 amHi Sandra. By default, the comments section on WordPress blogs is ‘No Follow’. If you wanted to make your blog comments section ‘Do Follow’, then you could get a WordPress plug-in to enable this. I don’t recommend this though as it can adversely affect your ranking in the search engines.
Ciao!
Posted by Jon | December 16, 2011, 12:17 amHi Jon Thank you so much for your response – it’s great to get an answer.
Posted by Sandra Madeira | December 17, 2011, 3:50 pm