Of course, if your blog has now found its way on to some dofollow lists as Cavan suggests, you’ll probably keep getting a steady stream of them for ages anyway. I doubt many will check your dofollow/nofollow status before cranking out a “Great blog! SEO is very important! Thanks.” comment.

There are all kinds of ways to get juice flowing to where you want it or need it.
One of these days I am going to have to test exactly how many links Google follow on some of my larger pages, though they tend to have more juice.

I didn’t mention this on the post, but I think it is wise for black hats (and gray hats) to avoid nofollowing their internal links. Why?

Search engines might not penalize sites for the technique, but it makes it a lot easier to identify SEO’d sites. If the techniques are black or gray then you will be in trouble.

Glad to see you back. I agree I need to give Jez a loyalty badge

Andrew - The question about PR sculpting is whether it can help every site. Even the small ones that don’t have a lot of link juice to share among their internal pages. You need to spend time testing and learning to do it properly. Again, I like the idea but I don’t think that it is useful for most small sites.

I like you, have been reluctant to jump on the “nofollow” bandwagon — hmm, “nofollow” and “bandwagon” — quite the interesting contradiction there.

It’s not that I don’t think it may serve some value, but that I feel that it’s promotion by engines, outside of comment blog spam and similar, is somewhat self-serving, and that it is still missing a deeper exploration of the impact of such actions. More to the point, regarding the latter, is that websites are like their own little communities or microcosms. What happens long-term when PageRank sculpting is performed blindly? Can more harm be done than good? Can we unknowingly choke off the life of part of a site? I don’t know that these things can happen, but I also don’t know that anyone has convinced me yet that they can’t.

Look forwarding to finally meeting you in person at SMX Advanced!

I am not surprised you joined no-followers as Flickr, Wikipedia etc. did. This way you will save yourself a bit of time. I also think that too many blogs go too far and put nofollow to ALL external links, even if quoting. That really damages the whole system and is so selfish.

This whole idea is very sad. I can understand the usage of nofollow for internal purposes but to do it for external links? Why complicate things so much? If somebody is selling tons of links, because this is what it is all about, they probably have some decent site. Otherwise, who would buy links there. If it is a spamsite, why not sandbox it?

Regards

Ben - I had already read that article and I am very familiar with what my peers think. Thanks anyways.

Hobo - Good to hear the plugin works!

I’m not surprised about your experience with PR sculpting. I personally don’t think it is a recipe for the vast majority of sites.

Hi Dharmesh, congratulations on your funding! I am sure it is a significant milestone for your startup. It helps give our industry much needed credibility.

I don’t think PR sculpting is a bad idea but at the end of the day we need to take a balance and see if it was worth the effort.

I do see large sites benefiting a lot from it, but for small sites with little or no PageRank, I don’t see how there can be a useful impact.

Dr Pete - I agree. thanks for your comment and your support.

Sam - Yeah - I let readers post comments on old posts. I get some really good comments and that is why I hesitate to close comments on old posts.

I guess I wont be able to avoid comment moderation. Maybe I should delegate that to my assistant

Jez - Glad to see you still enjoy my writing

Arachne - It is definitely sad. I will write a post explaining the problem with comment spamming with keyword rich names.

Scott - You are correct. I replaced your keyword rich name by the name on your e-mail. Please use your real name the next time you comment.

What I really hate are the antics some folks get up to; there are some first-time posts that ride the fence so closely that I end up googling for to see if they’re just spamming repeatedly to build pagerank in the hopes of dofollow—and yes, they are.

My funniest example is a guy who spent all of 2 seconds on the page to search for #comment and comment. He came in on an IceRocket search, and then basically stalked all my posts for comments via co.mments. If only we had filters that could detect such ridiculousness without us having to step in.

Glad to see this blog is still “alive” and have not forgotten about that write up… will get there in the end

I think it’s a good idea not to blindly just dofollow all links that you don’t pre-moderate. I guess you were moderating comments being posted on older entries and the time spent doing so was what ended up triggering this decision? One way would be closing commenting on posts after a while. It’s kind of harsh, but even if you do start nofollow’ing, in my experience the comment spam just keeps on coming. And that still leaves you with the same work, because you’re not really going to want to have viagra links posted in your comments, regardless of if they are nofollow’d. It might minimize it a little, but the majority of real spammers just don’t care that much or don’t check. Since adding nofollow to our site it hasn’t changed spam postings one iota, although I know that was the original intent of the thing. Cutting out the ability to comment on older posts should keep workload somewhat manageable I’d think?

But even with that in place I would probably still go nofollow by default till you can ascertain that commenting’s not just being done for link juice - dumb anyway if you ask me because I reckon anything within an id=’comment’ or class=”comment” etc gets weighed FAR less than other links by G.

What we do on blogs on our site is to nofollow all links to the blogs by default, but once they’ve posted 10 entries the links become dofollow. By the time anyone has posted 10 entries we’ve figured out if they are in it to really blog or just to game the system. Links outgoing from the blogs or forum are always nofollow, although longer term members can add follow’d links from their blogs. The latter might be a little harsh and we might tone it down for members that we know we can trust, but then again, that might make it look like links are dofollow for everyone visiting the site?!?

The real bottom line is that you always have to moderate anyway, dofollow or nofollow. If you run a site that you want others to view as professional that is!

At the end of the day, it’s something we have to re-evaluate constantly and strike the best balance we can. For me personally, while it’s great to get some link-love, I try to read blogs because I value the content and comment because I have something to say. So, follow or nofollow, I’ll still be reading.

Although getting more PageRank (SEO authority more generally) is always better, a lit bit of “nudging” (PR sculpting) doesn’t seem like a bad idea. There are some pages on the site that need to be linked to, but just aren’t important enough to try and get indexed or rank.

As far as nofollowing internal links to sculpt pr, I’ve decided I’ll be using this very reluctantly in future. I’ve tested this on my blog for 6 months, and the positive results are kind of minimal.

Perhaps on larger sites you’d see better results using nofollow.

10 SEOs views on pagerank sculpting.