The 42nd Estate

A while back we blogged about activating dofollow links for comments on our blog. It’s been a few months and today we’ll share with you our experience so far and a few changes here and across The 42nd Estate network.

Earlier this week I published a post on my personal blog, Prose of a Pol, discussing a comment policy that I implemented. Ever since providing dofollow links to comments at Prose of a Pol I noticed a significant increase in spammy comments. Thus, I decided to still reward commenters with a dofollow link, but also activated the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin, which allows you to set limits on who will receive a dofollow link.

So far the change is working well at Prose of a Pol, and it’s encouraged us to issue a comment policy for The 42nd Estate and our other sites. Thus beginning today, The 42nd Estate’s blog will no longer award dofollow links on comments. We will, however, continue to award dofollow links at My Last Name Means Money, but protected by Lucia’s Linky Love plugin which will set a minimum number of comments that must be written by that author before a dofollow link is awarded. We’ve set the limit quite low so regular commenters have nothing to worry about.

We’ve also gone ahead and installed Lucia’s plugin at We Demand Videos!, so now you may comment and get a dofollow link there too!

To sum up, here’s our dofollow and commentluv status on each of our blogs:

EDIT: After publishing this post, we realized we did not mention a key component of the policy posted at Prose of a Pol. Mainly, there are two points we wish to emphasize:

1. The username field is for your name, internet persona, or website title (sometimes). If we feel you are abusing the username field for the purposes of keyword stuffing, your comment may be remain nofollow or might even be deleted.
2. We reserve the right to keep your comment on the site but edit your name or url if we believe you are spamming for the purposes of keyword stuffing.

END EDIT.

Hopefully this policy and the above status for each site will clarify our dofollow stance. We still believe in awarding good comments with a dofollow link but we reserve the right to change our stance down the line. What do you think of our new comment policy? Is it fair? Let us know in the comments below!

Tags: comments, policy

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 2:53 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.