Aside question: what WP plugin or Blogger gadget/hack do I need to be able to respond to comments and have them look like they are from me, the moderator of the blog? Which one do you use here?

Great Post.

Regards,

Richard

Just Kidding! I realize that I have broken your pet peeve rule by putting the name of my blog in the "name" field, but, as you stated, it will get me no link love since "no follow" is turned on.

I did enjoy this post (especially about people who "guessed" the content and guessed wrong!). I was considering getting the plugin to turn off "no follow" but after reading this article, I am hesitant.

I will follow Alysson's feedback to see how it works on her site.

Again, thanks for the info!

Signed,

Live Your Way…ok, Richard

My 2c: nofollow all your comments but give something else back to those who comment regularly or those you just plain like enough to give something. Think about writing a review about their blog/website, following/commenting on their twitter account, talk to them at a conference, IM, whatever. At least that is something you can control..

p.s.: Kevin I wonder: what do you think about the 'house' metaphor I used

instead of a link saying "No Comments" use something more along the lines of "Be the First to Comment".

And definitively dofollow will help. Not every one is a comment spammer and receiving a little link-love for your comment is a nice trade.

Plus, if you have a strong blog, and you only allow links to original content sites, you should be fine.

If "pr-bleeding" is so terrible, then how do social bookmarking sites rank?

My other blogs get lots of comments but this new one is a head scratcher.

@Kevin – I didn't know commentluv greatly adds to the loading time of a page. I will look into that. But that hover thing, I didn't even know it's there!

Quitting The Day Job – Arghhhh. Why didn't you use your first name haha It sounds like you're not interested in using dofollow. May I ask a serious question though, why do you use your website name instead of your first name?

Sunil – The Lucia’s Linky Love plugin looks ok. Again, similar to the plugin I mentioned in the post, it does seem like you will have to actively monitor comments to make sure no one is trying to beat the system.

Chris – Thanks for commenting. I'm actually surprised that Search engine optimisers would promote this kind of thing. I know there are some benefits as far as promoting certain keywords etc but still, you would think that they would encourage bloggers to spend more time writing posts.

Sarah – Thats actually a good idea. Perhaps I should change those who put their keywords as their name to 'Anon'. Their is no benefit in putting keywords here as the nofollow tag is still there but it continues to happen.

Andre – Yeah, if you hover over the links you can see the last 3 comments from the commenter and their last blog post. This is not as obvious as commentluv however I was under the impression thar commentluv adds to the loading time of a page greatly.