But for established bloggers, especially with high PR, it’s one of the stupidest things to do. Let’s take John Chow for example. On some posts he has over a hundred comments. What would happen with dofollow? A madness.
I’m not even talking about spam(viagra, cialis, casinos) and comments with very low quality(good post, :), haha). And why give away for free something that you get paid for?

Conclusion: If your a new blogger with and don’t have many readers then you can install dofollow to get more traffic and comments. When you have enough readers, which doesn’t mean your ultimate goal, just enough to get really started, then remove the dofollow.

Link-backs from comments only appear in the posts and have no profile as such…

I think there is an issue of bleeding PR, but there are countermeasures to this… if you think about some of the other plug ins available for WP, and understand how PR works….

I think it comes down to how you generate traffic… if your traffic comes predominantly from google then don’t follow… but as this is a “blogger blog” I would have thought, in terms of traffic you would benefit from its installation.

I wont comment much on the no-follow do-follow debate but I will say this bit, whether you follow or not is up to you and it has nothing to do with the quality of yours posts therefore it shouldn’t make any difference for your readers. On the other hand I’ve noticed that you were slow on replying to comments lately, I even thought that your took a break. After reading this post I’ve concluded that after maybe you were overwhelmed. Nevertheless, I remember you advising to maintain good relations with people and I believe that replying to comments is certainly a sure way to do that.
I hope you’ll be enjoying five-figure blogging soon!

I gotta disagree with you on this one. Part of making money online is getting a large amount of traffic. And part of that traffic is from the blog community in general. Since the community at large is leaning toward the dofollow, aren’t you afraid that your resistance to “giving away links” could affect your traffic?

Sara

Those who somehow think removing the non follow somehow gives something back to a commentor have little concept of how page rank really works. But putting the top commenters on the front page side bar, that’s giving back with something that _does_ give a nice boost to those who participate .. so for those who somehow confuse love, page rank and money all in the same category, you’re giving out plenty your Highness.

For what it’s worth, one of the richest bloggers around and a guy who can write rings ’round most of us, Steve Pavlina calls comments one of his biggest early blogging mistakes … he has some interesting posts explaining his reasoning too … but he won’t take comments … c heck his stats and see how well it works for him