Using Dofollow is an excellent way of attracting traffic, but largely the wrong kind! As soon as your blog propogates around the dofollow community you will see the quality of the traffic on your site decrease.

I think someone should create a guide on how to manage the degradation of your traffic when changing to a dofollow policy.

Great site!!

I agree with the likes of Utah in the sense that as long as their is a discussion going on then it is good, but I just think it looks spammy when you only have keywords, and it makes replying to the person feel weird. I want to call someone by their name not their keyword!

Mmm thinking about that I might change my name to Search Engine Optimisation.

I think there is value in using both a name and a keyword in the Name field.

When I read blog comments I like seeing the person’s name and knowing that a real person is behind it. Yet I don’t like seeing just a name. I often am curious about that person’s background and I don’t want to click on every link to see their site.

To me, a combination of name and brief description answers that. Personally, I don’t even use a keyword that I’m actively trying to rank for. But it summarizes concisely what I do.

Frankly, I don’t like seeing just a business name or a keyword substituted for a name. But I think there is value for other readers in letting them know a little more about where your comment is coming from.

Maybe I’m alone in feeling this way, but that’s the way I see it.

Comments add user-generated content. Just got to be good about weeding out the crappy comments that have no additive value. People will get the picture.

IMHO, who cares if people get the anchor text they want if they’re adding to the discussion and coming back frequently in some cases?

Congrats on the new job!

Eric’s point about old posts being targeted is interesting. Anyone leaving a comment on my SEO Success Pyramid post gets a link from a PR4 page. And if this blog ever jumps to PR6, that post will probably jump to PR5. A couple of the recent comments there have been sketchy. But … on the other hand, my old post about Merchant Circle (see http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/strange-goings-on-with-merchant-circle/236/ ) gets a lot of Google traffic and quality comments from small business owners. So I don’t want to turn off commenting on old posts.

@Marcel - moderating all comments is not an option for me. If that were in place right now, this conversation you all had would never have happened because I wasn’t able to keep much of an eye on the blog today. The fact that 2-3 of you were able to comment immediately and without moderation encouraged the entire discussion. I don’t want to stop that.

Fred, on a purely SEO basis, your statement — “If you don’t use a keyword focused name, the do-follow link becomes almost worthless.” — is incorrect. All followed links from reputable, quality sites have value. Would you turn down a link from the CNN home page simply because it didn’t have the right anchor text for your site? Granted, this isn’t CNN, but I do believe it’s trusted and somewhat authoritative in the eyes of the search engines.

@Chicago Blog (Missy) - thanks for the kind words. I would certainly add Mike Blumenthal, Andrew Shotland, and a few others as “must read” local search marketers. To answer your question — yes, if your comment links are all no-followed, it doesn’t make what the anchor text says. Google says they ignore those links altogether. Yahoo will use the link itself for discovery of new pages, but won’t pass “link juice” from the no-followed link.

Thanks again, everyone, for the super discussion … keyworded anchor text and all.

Although I haven’t tried it myself, I know that there IS a “comment timeout” plugin for WP, which allows you to close off comments automatically on your posts, after a certain time period. Check out http://jamesmckay.net/categories/wordpress/comment-timeout/ although that’s the only one I’ve come across.