Giving visitors link juice
Just last week I wrote a post on adding nofollow to all outgoing links, or at the very least, paid links. However, I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t find it fair to people who comment on my site. Hence I’ve added a plugin that removes nofollow from people who’ve commented more than 5 times, as WordPress annoyingly incorporates nofollow in all comment links. It’s supposed to prevent spammers and sploggers, but in all honesty, Akismet does more than a good job doing that for me.
So what is nofollow? This is your regular link in html:
<a href="http://www.riyuu.org">Ever After</a>
Now if you added nofollow, the link will now look like this:
<a href="http://www.riyuu.org" rel="nofollow">Ever After</a>
By adding nofollow to your links, you’re telling the search engine spiders not to index the pages you linked to, hence the pagerank of the sites you linked to don’t increase. The name nofollow is misleading because the search engine spiders do follow/crawl the said link, it just doesn’t index them. Wikipedia has a nice chart showing how each search engine interprets nofollow. Dofollow, on the other hand, isn’t an attribute. Rather, it’s simply the absence of the nofollow attribute. Those “normal” links will be crawled and indexed by the search engines and affect one’s pagerank.
Speaking of pagerank, the pagerank for this site is now back to its original PR2, while Riyuu.org went from PR2 to PR3. I found the latter to be surprising because I haven’t updated the site in the longest time. Must be the fanlistings bringing in links 
Like I mentioned earlier, WordPress will automatically insert a nofollow attribute to all links in the comments of your blogs. As a matter of fact, it’s been doing so since version 1.5. So if you want to reward those commenting on your blogs loyally, there are many WordPress plugins that will remove nofollow from links. Give your visitors some link juice and remove nofollow 
Babyjen says:
ohw.. thanks for this advice dear.. it will surely help us especially the one’s who accepts sponsored links..=)
take care!
-xoxo-
Ai~ says:
The nofollow script you installed in genius… And yes, fanlistings DO significantly increase the pagerank, it’s insane!
Mimi says:
To Babyjen: No problem! I don’t see why we can’t accept sponsored links and give commentators love at the same time
To Ai: I just want to do the people who comment regularly a favor. Hopefully more people will start seeing the benefits of this and use plugins like these too! Now I’m tempted to move my fanlistings under this domain, but that would mean having EVERYONE change their links, and people can get lazy
Jeff Starr says:
Thank you for mentioning my dofollow reference article, and welcome to the dofollow community!
Mimi says:
To Jeff: Thanks! Your list of wordpress plugins were of great help!
Brad says:
I manage more than 20 blogs in my network and will say that nofollow free is the best plugin to use for this. I am also finding using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv is producing incentive to comment without a lot of extra spam. I have talked to other bloggers and even with all the buzz about commentLuv right now our spam has only gone up about 5% but our useful comments are really stepping up too.
Some other useful comment plugins include Brian’s Threaded comments and Subscribe to Comments. The two of those can prove to be a powerhouse combo and dramatically increase your readership via feeds.
Mimi says:
@ Brad: I definitely agree with you that nofollow free has been great. I might give CommentLuv a try too, because I’ve seen many blogs use it, and from your experience, it sounds like it’d be worth it. I’ll also give the other two a try when I have time. Thanks for all the great suggestions!
Keith says:
I recently removed the nofollow from my blog’s comments and I’ve since been flooded with comments. So make sure that if you are doing this you have Akismet activated.