Google recently (well, in 2009) changed the rules around the concept of what nofollow meant to website owners. It is generally understood that you need backlinks to your site and one method used by many WordPress owners will be to comment on other WordPress sites to get links back via the comment to their own sites.
CommentLuv Allows You To Give DoFollow Backlinks To Your Commenters
CommentLuv is indeed one way to get those backlinks, and as a CommentLuv Premium plugin owner, you have the choice to set the links you award to your commenters as either follow or nofollow.
If you’ve been reading my CommentLuv Review post, it mentions that the native WordPress commenting system creates all comment links (back to the commenter’s site) as nofollow links. An example of such a NoFollow WordPress comment is shown below.
The Meaning of Rel=NoFollow
The idea behind follow links is that they pass some power to the site they link back to – which in turn helps to raise the pagerank of that site. Nofollow links don’t pass any page rank power whatsoever. By setting up a link as external nofollow you are essentually saying to Google that you don’t want to pass any link juice to that site and you are implying the site is untrustworthy. Further Google infers something about your site if it takes part in online activity with low class sites.
In theory therefore, you could have 1000 nofollow links pointing back to your site but your site would never get off PR0 (pageRank 0) because the nofollow links would pass you no link juice or page rank power.
Is this true? I don’t know. It is certainly what Matt Cutts (general all round Google spokesperson) implies in these videos. These videos were the best ones I could find on the subject of NoFollow where Matt speaks very clearly about follow and nofollow links.
Will You Be Penalised By Google For Only Linking Out With NoFollow?
Are There Negative Implications To Having A Blog With DoFollow Comments?
Apparently, from the point of view of the site doing the backlinking, it doesn’t matter whether you use follow or nofollow, the link juice that doesn’t pass to the destination site is not kept on your own site. It is said to vanish (see rel=nofollow section of this page).
I’m not sure I entirely believe this – it may be a rumor put around by Google to discourage page rank sculpting.
In terms of the CommentLuv Premium Plugin – I don’t use dofollow at the moment. If I change my mind about this, I’ll update this post.
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