Using Dofollow or Nofollow attributes

For anyone who runs a blog, a commmon issue comes up, do I want to use Nofollow, or dofollow attributes on my links?

You have to look at it a few different ways, on one hand, if you keep your external links to nofollow, your blog will have a much stronger pagerank then with dofollow links. Just because a link may be nofollow doesn’t mean that it won’t appear in the search results for Google. If other websites are linking to it then Google may find the page through those links.

Dofollow links in your blog comments will actually encourage users to post on your blog, knowing they are getting a solid backlink which will direct search spiders to their webpages. This will help develop a “community” aspect to your blog as regular commenters will return for more knowing you’re helping build their rankings. In the case that dofollow is enabled on comment links, moderation will also have to be applied. Spammers regularily search for blogs to spam based on the link attributes applied to comments. If you do not moderate every incomming comment on your blog, eventually it will simply be filled with thousands of spam comments. For the most part spam comments are completely automated robots, thus it is important to stay on top of every comment sent to your blog.

Determining Nofollow vs Dofollow is a tough decision to make. On one hand you can easily encourage new users to comment on your posts, while slightly sacrificing your Pagerank. On the other you can have less comments and a more solid pagerank over time. It really depends on how much you value comments on your website.