We’ve been out and about, looking at blogs, viewing their source code to reveal the rel=nofollow attribute and here are some of our observations:
If you’re busy bloggers like we are, ie. you maintain several blogs, you write internet articles for several sites, you likely have a limited time to read other blogs. In fact, we have to budget a certain amount of time for this activity. This time can be used wisely by commenting on some great posts but to kill two birds with one stone the blog needs to be dofollow. A comment on a nofollow blog has only one positive attribute – the possibility of natural traffic from the link – there’s no link juice coming to your site by making the comment. Why would we want to do that? We wouldn’t when there are thousands of blogs that do give you link juice for making a comment.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an A-list blogger and your site makes you an annual six figure income – nice thought huh? Why would you care about nofollow? You wouldn’t since people come anyway and they comment and are likely unaware or don’t care that they don’t get any page rank credit for their comment. They are star-struck and just want to bask in the presence of celebrity. The A-lister probably believes that giving a dofollow comment link would siphon page rank away from his or her site – which after research, we believe is false – but nonetheless, it is believed by many webmasters. So the popular site has the juice but doesn’t want to spread it around for fear that it will diminish their site in the eyes of Google. So we say this – DON’T GO THERE! STAY AWAY and by all means, don’t waste your precious time commenting on these sites. Leave it to the spammers to comment them and the ridiculous star struck, celebrity seekers and such. If you’re a conscious blogger, find a network of blogs to read and comment on that are helpful to you. This is easy – there are at least a hundred blogs listed on our site that are dofollow blogs. Get connected with the CommentLuv community and you’ll have enough blogs available that will be helpful to you and by commenting on their sites, you’re being helpful to them. It’s a win win situation. If you run into a blog that you’d like to follow but they’re a nofollow blog, ask them to explain to you why they are that way – it’s possible they’re unaware of the situation. They’re most likely to tell you it’s because of comment spam which you should know by now is nonsense. Comment spams are easily caught by the Askimet plugin and it takes the same amount of time to delete or approve a comment. If someone is that concerned with comment spam, they should simply disable comments. But why wouldn’t they do that? Because a blog without comments is a one-sided conversation. Comments = social proof. A blog with lots of comments gives the appearance of a community so really nofollow blogs want their cake and to eat it too. They want real comments, they just don’t want to share the link currency.