I'm looking to bring more readers and traffic to my blog, and getting rid of the rel="nofollow" is one idea I'm considering. I would imagine that brings new visitors ... mostly ones looking for an IBL. Fortunately, I don't carry ads that need to be clicked on, I don't sell anything directly on my site, and I'm not gathering data; there's no such thing as a conversion. What I'm after is name recognition, and I track a few 'visitor engagement' stats. This should throw them off a bit, but that might be worth it to introduce my content to enough new sets of eyes. The content - photography - is good enough to leave a positive impression. And even if most of the new traffic isn't from and doesn't care about my locality, it still helps me expand my photog business indirectly. So ... any guesses how many people I might attract by removing the nofollow? If anybody out there has tried this, how much more time did you spend moderating comments? Do people post something intelligent the first time to get past the moderation and then add "me too" posts? Anything else I should consider?
No. I don't think page rank really leaks out from a site through outbound links. I'm guessing they'll use up some of the link juice a new post sends back to the rest of the blog, but I'm getting a lot of quality links from other sources. But I'm a little concerned that some people who would have linked to me otherwise, might not if they think it might turn their comment link into a 2-way reciprocal...?