Reward Blog Commentators with your Link Love

I’ve noticed that comments have gone down since I was busy working on my new template. I want you to know that I miss you guys and the Bloke is back bigger and better than ever.

According to the traffic data my blog statistics have never been better. So I know you are still reading the Bloke but you are not commenting and participating in the community like you did before.

One thing that I can do to encourage you to write more often is to reward you with my link love to go along with your comments. So I’ve removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute from my template so that you will get full credit with the search engines.

Background: What is the rel=”nofollow” attribute?

Way back in 2005 Google formally adopted the attribute to combat comment spam that was running rampant in the blogosphere. All of the major players in the blog platform and search engine arena adopted it wholeheartedly. 

The theory being that if the spammers were aware that they would no longer get any Google juice from choking our blogs, they would just give up and die. It seemed like a great idea at the time but in reality we all know from experience that it didn’t really make much of a dent in comment spam. Instead, the spammers just adapted and improvised, creating bogus free blogger blogs (aka adsense spam blogs) to generate income.

Since then all kinds of captcha filters have come into play that have dramatically reduced comment spam. And don’t forget that all blogs already come with the most powerful powerful anti-spam feature of all — it’s called the delete button.

So I asked myself why should my loyal readers have to continue to suffer the consequences of the spammers’ actions? Well know more, so when you leave a comment with a link to yourself, rest assured that Google will give you the link love that you deserve (at least on my blog anyhow). I suggest that you do the same.

Most modern templates come with the attribute already built in, but we are not obliged to play along. So if you want to opt out like I did then just go into your template and delete any references to rel=”nofollow” (as always please backup your template before you decide to edit it). And that’s it!

So why not reward your commentators and let them know how much you really appreciate them.

More Reading: What is “nofollow” and Why Your Blog Should Get Rid of It