Is a no follow comment section good or bad?

[JBPhotography]

I have a photography blog that I'm really trying to promote solid commenting.  What is everyone's opinion on nofollow vs do follow comments?

[AdamThompson]

I would only make the comments dofollow if you are going to police them carefully and delete links to any poor quality or shady websites.

[Tom-Anthony]

I'm not sure if anyone has any solid data on this, and even if they did I think it would be so conditioned on many other factors that it wouldn't be much help.

The pro's of allowing dofollow links from commenters on your blog is obviously that it encourages people to get involved, and maybe they stick around and become part of the community. The downside is the spammers who will invade!

You can argue both sides...

If people are going to bother to comment with good quality comments which are useful to building a community, and for they themselves to be persuaded to stick around is going to require that you are creating great content. If the content is crappy then people won't bother crafting great replies. So if the quality is crappy and you allow dofollow then you'll get (other than the spammers...) people who are maybe nice but aren't really interested in your community, they just want a link.

if the content is great then do you need the dofollow to persuade people to comment?

On the flipside, if the content is pretty good maybe a dofollow link helps to push people over the edge and make them bother to write the comment... If the community is small you should be able to manage the spam.

At the end of the day - I think you need to test in your niche and see what happens... Good luck!

[JBPhotography]

Thanks for this feedback.  I like to think the content is solid and getting good participation is key. I'm just trying to understand the SEO downside to allowing people to post comments with links to their sites or blogs.  Keeping in mind my blog is a photography blog so people that comment typically have photography blogs or portfolios.  I delete any and all spam.   I guess my question is does this hurt your search ranking with Google?

[CPU]

If you are going to make the comment links follow rather than no follow then there is a good chance that you will get heavily spammed. You mention you plan to delete spam but you may have to be very viligant and check often as I have seen blogs in the past that get tons of it per day and in the end it becomes a pain in the backside for the moderator and looks bad for genuine users of the site.

It may be worth trialling it rather than committing to it if that is possible with the set up of your site so if things do get too spammy you can quickly move to a nofollow approach.

[JBPhotography]

Correct.  I double check all comments and follow them back to the owners site.  If the owners site is spam I typically report it.   So I think what you're saying is there isn't a downside providing your super diligent on monitoring the site...is that correct?