In order to mitigate comment spam, the “rel=nofollow” link attribute has gained much notoriety. The idea behind it is simple: any link that is not trusted will have the attribute “rel=nofollow” added to it. The search engines will see this and ignore the link. One obvious problem with this is that good links are also ignored (i.e. the link target does not get “credit” for a site linking to them).
Here are examples of nofollow links.
Before:
<a href="http://www.mysite.com">Follow Me</a>
After:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mysite.com">Follow Me</a>
nofollow may appear with other words in the rel attribute:
<a rel="nofollow homerun" href="http://www.mysite.com">Follow Me</a>
Check with your blog host to see if nofollow is enabled. WordPress, for one, has it on and the only way to get it off is to install a plugin and turn it off.
If Google sees a nofollow in a link it will:
- not follow it
- not count it as a vote toward increasing PageRank
- not count the link text in determining the web page’s relativity
Note that Google does not assume the nofollow link is bad; it just ignores it. In other words, the link will not be used against you.
Nofollow is not only for blog comments; it can be used anywhere a link can. If you use links that you think may not be up to par, then it does not hurt to add the nofollow attribute.
If your blog is moderated or you get little or no spam then it is ok to turn off ‘nofollow’. Though not an answer to blog comment spam, at least it is part of an answer.
Doug
Blogger turns nofollow on in the comments section of all blogger blogs. To my knowledge it is impossible to turn off the nofollow tags from blogger comments, but typical articles and templates will not have them unless manually typed by the person loading a page or template.
Plus, it is possible to have nofollow tags in the meta tags of the header of a document, so check and set both at your discretion.