Approving wordpress comments?

craptakular · 10 Feb 2011 at 22:47

Do you guys approve people's comments that essential just say things like "awesome blog!" "Very informative" etc etc

These people seem to be looking for back links. I have no problem accepting them, hell it would be nice to get comments on blog and they aren't littered with spam or written in foriegnz so is this ok to accept?

I'm mainly worried that google will see my site linking out to a potential rubbish/ unrelated site.

Amy I fussing over nothing?

TwoSaints · 10 Feb 2011 at 23:07

read up on nofollow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Redgie · 10 Feb 2011 at 23:08

If you're blog is in need of some attention, accept them. If it's doing fine as it is, I wouldn't accept them.

craptakular · 11 Feb 2011 at 06:50

Well wordpress seems to auto insert re= external nofollow so it should be ok.

I'm gonna accept some for now but vet the site links a bit first.

Mark M · 11 Feb 2011 at 11:59

I get loads of generic "wow, great blog" and "keep blogging, I love reading your site" and when you look at their user data they have a lets say questionable site down as their url. Id actually say they were more likely to be spam bots.

fez · 11 Feb 2011 at 12:20

I thought that google had started giving less attention to nofollow tags for the most part when ranking a site. We have stopped using them in favour of javascript links as google has hinted that due to nofollow being used for internal page rank scrulpting rather than as a defence against dodgy external links.

craptakular · 11 Feb 2011 at 12:45

Hhhhm i'll shove them in the trash when i get home, im to scared to risk it

AJK · 11 Feb 2011 at 13:47

fez said:
I thought that google had started giving less attention to nofollow tags for the most part when ranking a site. We have stopped using them in favour of javascript links as google has hinted that due to nofollow being used for internal page rank scrulpting rather than as a defence against dodgy external links.

rel="nofollow" stops GoogleBot from following a link for the purpose of passing search engine "value" from your page to the linked page. However, Google still sees and understands the link; if you link to a known malware site with "nofollow" you will still get penalised for doing so.

With regards to internal sculpting: there have been changes to the way that Google handles the distribution of "value" from a page with X followed links and Y nofollowed links. Basically, if you have 100 followed links from a page, each of those links will receive 1/100 value. If you have 50 followed links, and 50 nofollowed links, the followed links will STILL receive only 1/100 value (because there are 100 links total), not 1/50 value as would be the case if only the followed links existed. (Info: seomoz.org blog post)

So overall: PageRank sculpting is not as valuable as it used to be, and if it's even a slightly dodgy link you are better off NOT publishing it on your site!