More Thoughts On Comments Affecting Page Rank

I for one am a bit upset with Google for deciding not to honor the rel=nofollow tag especially when it comes to comments.  This decision puts a lot more responsibility on the blogger and penalizes those who are not actively monitoring their comments.  Blogger, a Google owned company, by default sets comments to rel=nofollow.  Since Google is no longer honoring this tag it seems a bit strange and yet YouTube (Google owned) and even websites on Google use the rel=nofollow tag.  So are they or are they not honoring this tag? What they say they are doing and what they are actually doing are likely two very different things!

I came across a blog post of Why I Turned Off Blog Comments.  The bottom line is if comments are going to end up causing your blog to be penalized by Google, why allow comments in the first place?  As bloggers realize those comments are costing them PR (if Google really isn't honoring the nofollow) there will be more and more blogs closed to comments.  While this solves the problem of comment spam it effectively shuts down a very fundamental concept in blogging and that is creating a two way method of communication between the blogger and the reader.  While it solves the problem of PR evapouration it shuts down communication.  I really wonder which is worse?  Yes you lose some PR but what your really stand to lose is readers.  In the end losing readers really is the thing that will hurt your blog.

I really disagree with disabling comments.  There has to be a happy medium with being able to accept and reply to comments without it damaging your PR.  With proper management you can control what links are posted if any via manual stripping of the urls.  Set any of your replies to comments to use your blog name and url not your blogger profile link because even your replies to comments will drain your PR if it goes to your blogger profile.  I suppose you could always add some type of disclaimer that says all links are stripped from comments.  It seems to me that Google is really taking a backward step here!  How far bloggers will go to protect their PR remains to be seen.

Garden Gnome
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