Company blog does not have rel="nofollow" on comments. Is this bad for ranking?

[marms676]

I need some advise. I had an SEO/SEM guy set up a company blog (domanname/blog/) for SEO purposes. He has been able to get some new traffic (non converting traffic) through getting some of the posts to the top of google on some long tail phrases. It has been going for a year now.

Here is my concern. I have a bit over 200 out going comment links in the blog that do not have the "nofollow" attribute. A few are to related sites, but many are not. I told him my concerns that this could hurt our rankings, but he assured me it was ok and that it was more important to give people an insentive to post comments so our blog would look active.

After a year, we have really slipped on some of our top keyphrases, our home page PR dropped from a 4 to a 3 and I am really struggling with what to do. I have about 1,300 backlinks according to yahoo and have over 250 links going out, mostly from this blog. Should I switch the WP blog comments to nofollow (they are currently set to rel='external ')?

Thx

[ogletreeseo]

If you are not moderating your comments it is a good idea to use nofollow. If you are using wordpress you should get the plugin Spam Karma.

[SteveGerencser]

1. You should set up a blog to communicate with your customers and provide them with a direct form of communicating with the company.. Not for SEO purposes..

2. It doesn't matter.. You should be thrilled that over 200 people have taken the time to participate on your blog, not worried about imagined harm that could be done..

3. No.. PR drops across the board continuously.. As more sites are created the value of each individual link on the internet is lowered slightly.. If you stop building links, your PR will go down over time.. Its the nature of things..

To explain a bit for those that don't understand, and this is horribly simplified for those that do so I don't want to hear none of your guff ) Every single link on the web is assigned a value.. All those values added together = 1.. So, as more links are added to the internet the value of those links necessarily has to lower slightly to keep the total value = 1..

Add to this that as everyone's link value drops slightly, the ability to pass value also drops and you have a downward spiral effect on PR.. This is why you can never stop promoting your site..

And finally, I personally think that the nofollow attribute is one of the greatest evils ever forced on the internet community by a single company trying to make a profit on links..

[danlefree]

If your SEO/SEM guy has managed to do little more than attract traffic which does not convert, start with a rel="nopay" on his services.

Setting rel="nofollow" to outgoing links on your blog is not going to turn the tide for your site's rankings one way or the other - you need a new strategy for promoting your site and it sounds like that will entail getting someone who actually knows what he's doing.

[williamc]

If your SEO/SEM guy has managed to do little more than attract traffic which does not convert, start with a rel="nopay" on his services.

Gawd, there was really no need to lose that mouthful of coffee, it was perfectly good.

[kevsta]

we have more than 400 dofollow comment links from our blog and it ranks fine. as long as youre moderating comments and not linking to spam sites you'll be fine, nofollow wont make a blind bit of difference, it may even hurt things if you believe what G say now.

your performance decrease is most unlikely to be because of the blog, you may well have fallen even further by now without it.

[deepsand]

After a year, we have really slipped on some of our top keyphrases, our home page PR dropped from a 4 to a 3 and I am really struggling with what to do. I have about 1,300 backlinks according to yahoo and have over 250 links going out, mostly from this blog.

Setting aside the mathematical technicality that requires that the grand total of the actual PR values of the universe of indexed resources always = 1, out-bound links are immaterial to the PR of the page(s) on which they reside.