Yesterday I published an article explaining how posting comments on other peoples' blogs can help or not help your PageRank.
Today, I'm going to tell you how other people commenting on your blog will hurt your PageRank.
And it has to do with the rel="nofollow" attribute. Specifically, blog comments hurt your PageRank only when they include a link, either a link in the text of the comments, or a link in the Name field of the comments.
In short, while the nofollow attribute doesn't pass PageRank through to the landing page, it subtracts PageRank value from other dofollow links. That is, the links you have pointing to other pages within your site will lose PageRank due to the external "nofollow" links in the comments.
For example, you have a page with a 100 PageRank point value, and that page has four links. Three links are internal links pointing to other pages in your website. The one other link points to an external website, and contains a nofollow attribute. Only 75 points will flow back into your website.
That is, even though the other link has a "nofollow" attribute, it still subtracted 25 points from the PageRank that would have flowed back into your website.
And where does that extra 25 points go? Nowhere. It doesn't flow into the external website. It just vanishes into thin air.
Matt Cutts, the principal architect of Google's search engine, explains this on his blog...
Google developed the "nofollow" attribute in 2005 as a way to combat comment spammers. They hoped that it would cause spammers to give up and go away. But it didn't have much effect. Comment spammers still found that they could get a fair amount of traffic from the clickthroughs. So they actually intensified their spamming efforts by employing comment bots to spam thousands of blogs to increase the clickthroughs.
So Google responded by pushing the burden on to the blog owners to moderate their comments. That's what this current nofollow policy does.
As you moderate a new comment, you have to decide if that comment is worth the PageRank you're about to lose. Where at one time the nofollow attribute allowed us bloggers to accept comments comfortably, we now have to weigh the potential PageRank loss with our overall community-building efforts. ✓
Today, I'm going to tell you how other people commenting on your blog will hurt your PageRank.
And it has to do with the rel="nofollow" attribute. Specifically, blog comments hurt your PageRank only when they include a link, either a link in the text of the comments, or a link in the Name field of the comments.
In short, while the nofollow attribute doesn't pass PageRank through to the landing page, it subtracts PageRank value from other dofollow links. That is, the links you have pointing to other pages within your site will lose PageRank due to the external "nofollow" links in the comments.
For example, you have a page with a 100 PageRank point value, and that page has four links. Three links are internal links pointing to other pages in your website. The one other link points to an external website, and contains a nofollow attribute. Only 75 points will flow back into your website.
That is, even though the other link has a "nofollow" attribute, it still subtracted 25 points from the PageRank that would have flowed back into your website.
And where does that extra 25 points go? Nowhere. It doesn't flow into the external website. It just vanishes into thin air.
Matt Cutts, the principal architect of Google's search engine, explains this on his blog...
So what happens when you have a page with "ten PageRank points" and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.
Google developed the "nofollow" attribute in 2005 as a way to combat comment spammers. They hoped that it would cause spammers to give up and go away. But it didn't have much effect. Comment spammers still found that they could get a fair amount of traffic from the clickthroughs. So they actually intensified their spamming efforts by employing comment bots to spam thousands of blogs to increase the clickthroughs.
So Google responded by pushing the burden on to the blog owners to moderate their comments. That's what this current nofollow policy does.
As you moderate a new comment, you have to decide if that comment is worth the PageRank you're about to lose. Where at one time the nofollow attribute allowed us bloggers to accept comments comfortably, we now have to weigh the potential PageRank loss with our overall community-building efforts. ✓
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