Simply spoken, Nofollow backlinks are links on a site or blog which have a special HTML tag on them which tell the search engines not to "follow" aka "value" a link.

We all know the problem of comment spam: People posting comments with their link, people who hope to get some "link juice" to their sites from placing a link back to their site.

Here is what i think:

Enforcing a "nofollow" policy or even disabling all links for site visitors and commenters (so their links turn to plain text) is incredible egoistical.

A webmaster will always profit from content and comments on his site, and as long as spam is not getting out-of-hand its just polite to grant the comment posters at least the right of being able to place a link.

Especially on wordpress there are many, many ways to actually prevent spam. Talking of akismet plugin which doesn't even let legit trackbaks through, or other anti spam plugins which can be used.

Bowing down to google for SEO benefits and being paranoid about PR is very egoistical, in my opinion.

Just yesterday i set many of my banners here to Nofollow as well as all the affiliate links, upon advice from some SEOs on warrior forum in regards to my question why i still have PR0 on a site which is 3 years old.

Dont get me wrong, i am not stupid. There might be indeed the problem of PR "leaking out", this is why i did it here, but i would never FORCE all my comments to nofollow, neither here or on any of my countless wordpress blogs. Let alone turn all links into text because i would be so paranoid that "PR might be leaking out". This is like the ultimate bowing down to Google. My $0.02

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