Lucia’s Link Love Plugin is a great way for WordPress bloggers to show some love to their most frequent commenter’s. What I really like abut this one is the fact that I can set the time when a commenter’s link becomes a “do follow” link.

Traditionally all WordPress blogs have inbuilt rel=”nofollow” attributes. What this means is that search engines don’t get to crawl the links with these attributes attached. Your link will still send traffic to the sites, but they won’t see an incoming link from you. In essence it is a self preserving safety mechanism that protects bloggers from becoming an unknown link farm.

But using “no follow” also has its disadvantages since many bloggers only comment on blogs that have the “do follow” attribute installed most often done with a Plugin. So it could potentially stop you from getting comments on your blog. There is a whole trend with bloggers that use the “do follow” attribute because they want to give back to their readers. But it also has its drawbacks.

For example, you might get more spam comments or even more sblog ( spam blogs) trackbacks if you are using do follow. But one good thing is that with Lucia’s Link Love Plugin you have some measure of control.

Here are the main benefits:

1. It encourages good comments from regular readers
2. It helps to encourage links to your blog
3. Inbuilt security with peace of mind
4. You can control extra long URLs by excluding them from do follow
5. More overall control opposed to traditional do follow Plugin
6. Allows you to set a number between 3-10 of when a link does become do follow

As with all good things, there is always a negative side to it because there are some people who just can’t resist to ruin a good thing.

Negatives:

1. The main point would be that you might get more spam comments trying to slip through the net. All though I have found this to be no problem myself since I swapped to this Plugin on my own blog.
2. Giving our more links from your blog

If you are interested in having a go at this Plugin, then you can click to download.

Below is a screen shot of the admin section and to read about the installation go directly to the site.

It is entirely your own choice of whether you like to adapt to the do follow movement or not. I guess I did and I’m happy for now. But that is not to say that I might change this in the future depending on the effect it has for my SEO.

Monika

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