Should you use the “follow” or “no follow” attribute for your blog comments? That is the question!
Like many other blogger’s, I went through promoting the “Comment, We Follow” scenario, and utilized the “Do Follow” attribute on my blog comments. But then there comes a time when you have to stop and think about how that affects your blog from a business perspective. Recently, I decided to eliminate the whole “do follow” mentality (for a while anyhow). To follow or not to follow seems to be a double-edged sword. On one hand you may get more comments, which can also benefit your blog, but on the other hand it may be good until your site is getting lots of traffic before you start giving away page rank through comments.
By eliminating the do follow attribute, I suppose some blogger’s may therefore wish to refer to me as a selfish, unsociable, or a bad blogger to hang out with – lol, but I decided to take on what I’ll refer to as my “business perspective”. Besides, all is not lost though, for those using the no follow attribute for comments, which still benefit the person who comments! I don’t pass up opportunities to comment on no follow blogs, and neither should you.
You may be wondering what I mean by business perspective, in regards to blogging? To begin with, let’s think about any other business. The first thing about business is survival! Will you and your blogs survive, if you give away all your page rank via comments? Unless you have a huge following of other websites linking back to you, how are you going to survive if you give away all your page rank in comments? You won’t! Let’s face it, if your indexed blog posts and pages don’t appear in the higher search engines results, you might as well throw in the towel, unless you don’t care about your blogs and traffic.
If you look at the largest sites online, are they giving away page rank via the “Do Follow” attribute with their comments software? NO! So, how do you think us little gals, or guys will survive as blogger’s if we do? We won’t, unless our blogs are already ranking very well! 
In regards to serious blogging, I think the first thing one needs to think about is their personal business perspective, and realize that blogging isn’t any different than any other form of business, and the first thing you have to look out for is your own survival! Otherwise, what you have to contribute to the Internet as a blogger is of little value, because your blogs will rarely be found or read, if you don’t establish higher search engine rankings. If you plan to sell advertising on your blogs you will also struggle to maintain sponsors interests if your site isn’t able to maintain it’s page rank status.
If you’re a serious blogger, you may want to look at whether or not you’re applying a serious business perspective or not – if that is your ultimate goal as a blogger. If not, your time blogging will perhaps always be like working as a volunteer. If that is your goal, that’s okay. If the equivalent of volunteering isn’t your goal, then I challenge you to examine your goals as a blogger. Are you wanting to work essentially as a volunteer, or develop your blogging into more of a business adventure? If your goals are focused on a business mentality, then you need to seriously address the question in regards to things such as comments attributes. Will you choose to use the no follow attribute for comments, or the do follow attribute? That is the question! But, it’s only one question of many that you must ask yourself if your desire is to blog with a business perspective! If you choose to use the no follow attribute, I’m one blogger who won’t judge you for that decision, and I would still be happy to comment on your blog. Happy blogging! 
No Follow for Blog Comments is Still Good
Stuck on searching for only the “Do Follow” blogs to leave comments? According to Google, all is not lost for those who leave comments on blog posts or web pages using the “No Follow” attribute!
According to Google’s Webmaster Central, you may still benefit by leaving comments on relevant blogs using the no follow attribute, (assuming you are filling in the form with your blog or website url, and that the site links your name to your blog or website, from their comment section). If you don’t believe me, read for yourself the following excerpt below from Google Webmaster Central:
In other words, if your blog or website is already linked to by other reputable sites, and/or you have submitted a Sitemap to Google, then your comments with a link to your site may still be of benefit to you! My research on this topic led me to the above quote from Google’s site after reading an article about the benefits of commenting. In David Koh’s article about the benefits of commenting, he stated,
The other obvious benefit of commenting on sites that use the no follow attribute is the fact that it can also still of course lead to an increase of traffic to your site, providing you leave read-worthy comments, and that your site is relevant to the one you commented on.
To serve as an example, I’ve included some images here to demonstrate the fact that leaving comments on no follow blogs, will still be of benefit to your blog! The image you see below is a comment I recently left on a blog, that is relevant to my Tall Sails Adventure blog. The comment I left is on a Blogger blog, which automatically utilizes the no follow attribute, which you can see in the properties shown in the image including my comment, with my name linked to my Tall Sails Adventure blog.
Regardless of that fact that it was a no follow attribute comment, Yahoo has already picked up on my comment, counting it as a link to my blog!
Yes, I realize Yahoo works differently than Google, but the point here is that commenting on blogs with the no follow attribute is still beneficial to you, and this serves as just one example.
Keep in mind though that the more relevant your blog post permalink topic has with the blog post you’re commenting on, the better it is for you. Don’t always leave comments with just your blog home page. Use relevant blog post permalinks whenever it makes sense to.
The second image below shows an incoming link I discovered while I checked out my links with Yahoo. It didn’t take long for Yahoo to count it as a link for my blog, and I’ll certainly not complain about a link count from Yahoo! Results like this are also now showing up in my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard too!
If you spend your time only looking for blogs with the Do Follow attribute, you will probably spend more time making that determination, when instead you could have spent the time in contributing good comments regardless of which attribute the website or blog applies. If you didn’t already know of this benefit, my hope is that you now understand how commenting on blogs that use the no follow attribute is still beneficial for your blog.
With all that being said…. Care to comment now?