Noindex/nofollow on blog comments; is it good or bad ?

[johnny122]

Hi,

I changed the design of one my wordpress website at the beginning of the month. I also added a "facebook seo comments" plugin to rewrite facebook comments as normal comments.

As most of the website comments are facebook comments, I went from 250 noindex/nofollow comments to 950; URL's are ?replytocom=4822 etc.

Moz campaign noticed it and I'm asking myself : is it good to have comments in noindex/nofollow ?

Should I do something about this ?

Erwan.

[danatanseo]

I understand why blog comments might be "nofollow" - because it preserves the page authority of the post. However, I don't understand why one would want to "noindex" blog comments. It seems to me that all that UGC, if indexed, would just make the page it resides on far more valuable.

Is my view of that skewed? Am I missing something? Thanks! (and sorry to answer your question with a question)

If it were me I would nofollow the comments but index the content of the comments.

[Saijo.George]

Personally I would index comments but have a nofollow attribute to links within the comments. See what sort of tile and description the comments url generate ( you dont want duplicate titles and meta for those )

EDIT:

do you have some sample urls we can look at ?

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Erwin,

I have been wondering about this myself. I am a believer that no-follows contribute but as co-citation, however I have no proof. Testing this theory would be fun.

[johnny122]

Thank you for your answer people. It looks like index,nofollow would be indeed better.

By looking more on the net, I also found a yoast article about this issue: http://yoast.com/wordpress-threaded-comments-and-seo/

"WordPress automatically adds a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag to each URL that has ?replytocom in it."

This is why all my comments URL look like http://www.example.com/example-post/?replytocom=1

Yoast plugin update offers an option to remove ?replytocom variable. I think that I will have to drop All in one SEO on this website...